Robert Buchanan; a critical appreciation, and other essays

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Robert Buchanan

A CRITICAL APPRECIATION

AND OTHER ESSAYS

Robert Buchanan

A CRITICAL APPRECIATION

AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY

HENRY MURRAY

' I pass too surely : let at least Truth stay '

Browning {C/eon)

LONDON

PHILIP WELLBY

6 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

1901

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4 1 •.'...• • • ' . ■ •,*.••' • . • . • .

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1VI3?T

70
SAMUEL MACKEW, ESQ., M.D.

My Dear Doctor, —

It was at your instigation^ and under your

editorial auspices^ that a considerable part of the work

contained in this volufue was done. I find a sincere pleasure

tn dedicating the hook to you as a memento of our connexion.

Believe me always,

Tours sincerely,

HENRT MURRAY.
London, June 1901.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

ROBERT BUCHANAN i

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE . .116
A FRENCH FIEW OF RUSKIN . . .128

RUSKIN AND CARLTLE 140

RUDTARD KIPLING 153

FRENCH AND ENGLISH 163

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON 182

A LYRIC LOVE 202

MISS MARIE CORELLl 215

DE PROFUNDIS 230

Robert Buchanan.

I FIRST met Robert Buchanan in the summer of
1885. Our acquaintance, for some time of a lax
and ordinary kind, was — very characteristically of
such a man — cemented into a warm and enduring
friendship by an occurrence which would have
brought most acquaintances to an abrupt termination.
An article from his pen on ' The Modern Young
Man as Critic ' appeared in a monthly review,
attracting a good deal of attention and a considerable
amount of public comment. It compared some of the
more prominent among the younger literary person-
alities of the day with corresponding types with which
Buchanan had been familiar in his youth, and denounced
their pessimism, their irreverence, and their cheap
culture in the cut-and-thrust fashion we had all, long
before that date, learned to associate with his polemical
utterances. I was at that time associated with a cer-
tain weekly publication, now extinct, which enjoyed
a great reputation for smart and outspoken comment
on current topics, and my editor — who was more or
less lie with more than one of the objects of Buchanan's
onslaught — commissioned me to reply to his article.

B

ROBERl BUCHJNAN.

My feelings towards Buchanan at that time were
of a somewhat mixed description, compounded of
admiration for the genius evident in his best work,
and regret that he should so often fall below the lofty
level which, in his happier moments, he attained and
kept so easily ; and in my criticism of * The Modern
Young Man as Critic' the second of those senti-
ments certainly found stronger expression than the
first. I had at that time a tendency, which perhaps
even now I have not altogether outworn, to let my
pen run away with me, and to express the passing
mood of the moment with unnecessary strength.
What I said was, as Buchanan himself subsequently
confessed, true enough, but it was truth savagely
spoken, and I have to own that the article was per-
meated by a certain air of personal resentment, quite
unjustified by the circumstances of the case. As the
hazards of life drew us closer and closer together I
regretted my virulence more and more ; and when,
some months after the appearance of my ill-tempered
article, Buchanan, by a most thoughtful and quite un-
solicited act of friendship, showed how kindly he had
come to regard me, I felt that the hour for full con-
fession had arrived. I wrote to him, avowing myself
the author of the article and apologising more for
its manner than its matter. His reply was like him-
self— fi*ank, cordial, generous. ' Nobody knows better
than I how, in these random fights of the literary
arena, a man loses his temper and strikes harder than
he need. I have many such sins on my conscience.

ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

There is really very little in your article that you
need regret, and indeed, knowing how you feel on
these matters, I do not see how you could well have

written otherwise To requite your candour, I

was fairly certain that you had written the article,
and quite certain, if my belief was true, that you
would sooner or later " own up " to it. Don't avoid
me like the plague because you have voluntarily gone
into the confessional, but come up to dinner next
Sunday and do penance.' The matter was never
again mentioned between us, and this apparently
untoward accident was the starting-point of an
absolutely uncheckered friendship of more than
twelve years' duration. I mention it here only because
it was so richly characteristic of a side of Buchanan's
nature which the majority of people, knowing him
merely from his published utterances, could hardly
believe him to possess. A man of passionately
cherished ideals, most of which were utterly opposed
to the practice of his day ; a man who, while he
lived, must freely speak whatever truth he saw, at
whatever cost to the feelings or interests of in-
dividuals ; he was incapable of the least personal
malice towards an opponent. His relations with
Rossetti furnish an illustrative case. It is certainly
not worth while, at this time of day, to dig up the
buried and forgotten bitternesses to which the once
famous ' Fleshly School ' criticism gave rise. The
protagonists — Buchanan himself and the men of genius
he had attacked — fought their battle vehemently, but

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

honestly. There was hard hitting in plenty, but none
' below the belt.' But smaller and less honest partisans
envenomed the strife with all sorts of petty false-
hood. The absolutely unfounded statement that
Buchanan had puffed his own poems in the
pseudonymous ' Thomas Maitland ' article has been
quite recently revived, and, so long as the memory
of the incident remains, will probably never be finally
laid to rest. But all the petty spite imported into
the dispute by the outside skirmishers could not
prevent Buchanan from owning that he had over-
stated his case, and in the ardour of over -statement
had neglected sufficiently to recognise Rossetti's
genius. To that genius he paid eloquent tribute on
more than one occasion, but never so touchingly as
in the dedication to Rossetti of his novel, * God and
the Man.'

TO AN OLD ENEMY.

I would have snatch'd a bay leaf from thy brow,
Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head ;

In peace and tenderness I bring thee now
A lily-flower instead.

Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be :

Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
And take the gift from me.

Ten months later came the news of Rossetti's
death, and Buchanan added the sad and charming
lines : —

ROBERT BV CHAN AN.

Calmly, thy royal robe of Death around thee,

Thou sleepest, and weeping Brethren round thee stand ;

Gently they placed, ere yet God's angel crowned thee,
My lily in thy hand.

I never saw thee living, oh my brother,

But on thy breast my lily of love now lies.
And by that token we shall know each other

When God's voice saith ' Arise ! '

A year or two later (in 1877), in 'A Look (8'^(
Round Literature,' he emphasised and extended this
already sufficient apology, moved thereto by an
article in the British ^arterly^ the writer of which,
says Buchanan, ' takes occasion to repeat at second-
hand, for a wiser generation, all the hasty expressions
and uninstructed abuse that I published in hot haste
ten years ago, and have since, as my readers know,
repented. It is so easy,' he goes on, ' to create a
nickname that will stick, so difficult to write a
criticism that will endure. Perhaps it may be worth
while .... to show the readers of this book how
false a judgment it was, how conventional and
Pharisaic a criticism, which chose to dub as
** fleshly " the works of this most ethereal and
dreamy — in many respects this least carnal and most
religious — of modern poets.' Seldom have royaller
compliments been paid by a poet to a contemporary
poet than those Buchanan poured at the feet of
Rossetti. ' The man was a magician, of the tribe
of Kubla Khan ; and at his bidding there rose a
stately pleasure dome, every precious stone of which

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

had a name and a mystery, and when he entered it
to weave his strange verse, he was within his right

in using the language of incantation If he was

wrong, all the mystics have been wrong ; Boehmen
was a blunderer, Richter was a proser, Novalis was
no poet.' And in the brief following passage he
plumbed the depth of the mystery of Rossetti's
work : ' He uses amatory forms and carnal images,
just as he uses mere sounds and verbalisms, to ex-
press ideas which are purely and remotely spiritual ;
and he takes the language of personal love to express
his divine yearning, simply because that language is
the most exquisite quintessence of human speech.'
And again : ' This mood of perfect vision and grave
assurance inspires all the best work of Rossetti. He
has no questions to ask, no problems to trouble him ;
he is sibylline, not from being puzzle-headed, but
because he has looked behind the curtain of the sibyl.
He sees the trees walk, he hears the flowers speak,
with a sober certainty of waking bliss. When an
angel passes him, he can feel the very texture of
his robe, and tell the colour of his eyes. He is as
sure of Heaven and all its white-robed angels as
ordinary men are of each other.' Further on, speak-
ing ■ of the Sonnet Sequence, ' The House of Life/
which the British Quarterly reviewer had stigmatised
as a ' house of ill-fame,' he wrote : ' It is, to a cer-
tain extent, monotonous, and the sacrament of flesh
and blood has a constant place in it ; but out of
this sacrament rises the ghostly vision of the Host,

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and ere he has ended we hear the voices of all the
angels praising the Lord of Heavenly Love. And
of this strange texture, of this starry woof, is the

so-called " fleshly " poetry The stairs of the

earthly love lead to the heavens ; he ascends them
s'lep by step, that is all, hand in hand with his
sweet guide — who is a bright earthly maiden at the
beginning, then a bride, then a shining creature,
winged and marvellously transfigured ; the rest in
order ; last, an amethyst ! You can transfigure Love,
but you can never transfigure Lust ; this last never
made an angel, or inspired a true poem, yet,' * And
so,' he adds as his final word — a word which, one
might be excused for hoping, might be allowed to
remain the last regarding the entire business — ' And
so, when all is said and done, the friendly criticism
remains the best and wisest. Those who have read
Mr. Swinburne's eulogy of his master, and thought
it, perhaps, a little strained, may admit, at least, that
it was strained, like all eulogy of love, in the right
direction. My own abuse was and is, like all hasty
contemporary abuse, nothing. Mr, Swinburne's
honest praise was, and is, like all honest praise,
something. The poet of " The House of Life " is
beyond both ; but his fame will remain, when all
detraction is forgotten, as a golden symbol, a^re
perennius, of much that was best and brightest in
the culture of our time.'

It is pleasant also to know that, even in the
first heat of the strife occasioned by Buchanan's

S ROBERT BUCHANAN.

original criticism, Rossetti could recognise the high
qualities of his assailant, as he showed when he
interrupted the denunciations of an ardent partisan
by the emphatic exclamation, * Yes — but, by Jove,
he ' J a poet ! ' As Christopher North said, when he
held out the olive-branch to his old foeman, Leigh
Hunt, ' The animosities pass, the humanities are
eternal.'

It may interest the reader, and may serve as a
further illustration of the real kindliness of personal
feeling which underlay Buchanan's occasional viru-
lence of attack, to read the brief address to two of
his oldest and most persistent opponents, the late
Edmund Yates and the living Henry Labouchere,
which was, by a mere accident, left out of its proper
place in the first — and at present, only — volume of
*The Outcast'

So, Edward, Henry, pax vobiscum^
Arcades ambo, here's adieu !

All strife, all hate, at last to this come —
The silent grave, the sunless yew.

The scandal-monger, the truth-seeker,
The man of this world or a fairer.

Must drink at last of the same beaker,
Whereof a skeleton is bearer.

A little space a little life,

A little time a little strife.

Then calm, then rest, then slumber deep,

'Mid the black brotherhood of sleep.

As Rome was once, when on the Tree

Bloom'd the blood -rose of Calvary,

So is our England now, and you

Perform your parts like Romans true.

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Afoot or horse-back, proud or prone,

Continue beautiful and brave,
And take a smile, and not a stone,
From him who walketh all alone

The common highway to the grave.

The student of Buchanan who would thoroughly
understand his work — and more especially his critical
work, literary or social — must be careflil to keep in
mind one pregnant fact regarding him. He was the
descendant of a long line of Calvinistic Puritans, and,
although half an Englishman by the maternal side, and
bred, to his tenth year, south of the Border, he was,
in many respects, a thorough-going Scotsman. The
Celtic ichor accounted for much of his utterance as a
writer, and much of his conduct as a man. When the
Cockney critic anathematised him as a ' provincial,' he
not merely accepted the description, he proclaimed and
gloried in it — as also did another Scotsman, with
whom in most respects he had little enough in common
— Thomas Carlyle. The practice of the literary art in
the freest of Bohemian society, influences which act
with such deadly effect as solvents on the prejudices,
innate or acquired, of most men, never affected in any
appreciable degree Buchanan's philosophy of life.
Loathing Calvinistic theology, he remained a Calvinistic
moralist to the end of the chapter ; and that morality
impregnates every serious utterance on life and its
mysteries that ever fell from his pen. Absolutely
at the antipodes of mere asceticism — no man better
loved the good things of this life than he — sensuality

10 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

was horrible to him. It was for that reason that
he fell foul of Rossetti, as on other occasions he
ftW foul of Mr. Swinburne and Theophile Gautier,
because — mistakenly, as we have seen that he candidly
and generously confessed — he thought him what Byron,
in his ' English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,' called
Thomas Moore, ' A mere melodious advocate of lust'
To Buchanan, sexual love was one of two things.
Sanctified by affection, it was the holiest and most
beautiful thing in life ; not so sanctified, the basest and
most degrading. Men of the world find foothold for
themselves somewhere between these extremes of
opinion ; but in many respects Buchanan had no desire
to be accepted as a man of the world, and, as one who
knew intimately every detail of his personal life for
many years, I can testify that he at least sealed his
faith by his daily practice. A man is never a Puritan
upon one point alone, and Buchanan's puritanism, so
far from being merely sexual, invaded and coloured his
views of all the important questions of life. He hated
triviality, cackle and small talk and scandal, and any-
thing which could come under Matthew Arnold's
sweeping definition of ' intellectual levity. ' Consequently,
he had scant love for modern journalism, and especially
for that department of journalism marked by the prefix
'Society.' Hence his vehement onslaughts on Mr.
Yates and Mr. Labouchere, and much of the criticism
of contemporary art and literature which earned for
him, among strangers to his personality, a reputation as
a cantankerous spoil-sport.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. ii

It was Buchanan's innate tendency and cultivated
habit to look almost entirely to the ethical value of any
literary work which attracted his attention. He
summed up his critical doctrine in a single phrase in the
'Epistle Dedicatory' of' The Outcast,' to ' C. W.S.,' a
phrase to the effect that ' a Poet was a Prophet and a
Propagandist or nothing.' This present utterance of
mine being intended, not as a eulogy at-any-price —
a form of literary exercise which Buchanan detested
— but as a critical appreciation, I may say that this
phrase neatly defines the battle-ground of many a
tough and interminable argument between us. I do
not go so far as absolutely to reverse Buchanan's
dictum, or even so far as to say that a poet is never less
a poet than when he is engaged in preaching or propa-
gandising ; though either of those positions is, I believe,
quite tenable, and both have been frequently and ably
defended. Personally, I fly very light in the matter ot
artistic dogma. The one qualification I inexorably
demand of an artist is — that he shall know his business.
So long as a painter's pictures are beautiful in form and
colour, so long as a poet's verses are clear in meaning
and exquisite in verbal expression, they are good
enough for me — barring, of course, the artistic
expression of cases of abnormal ethical aberration, such
as have sometimes, though very rarely, occurred. La
correction de la forme, cest la vertu, said Theophile
Gautier, and in matters artistic I accept that ruling,
with certain private reservations which I feel no need to
express at length.

12 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

To a man of Buchanan's mental habits, such a
declaration necessarily appeared as the confession of
a Sadducee and a dilettante trifler, tolerant of all
moralities for the simple reason that he had none of his
own — the view taken by the dogmatist of the latitu-
dinarian in all ages. But I cannot but think that his
intransigeance on this point cost him much. It
certainly blinded him to the mere artistic beauty of
much work which happened to be based upon interpre-
tations of the eternal verities differing from his own —
such, for instance, as that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
Though I share to the full Buchanan's hatred of the
ultra-Jingo views which Mr. Kipling has made it his
business to interpret, I cannot but think it a pity that
any divergence of opinion should disable a critic of that
gentleman's work from perceiving and enjoying even its
merely technical excellence, or should cause him to ignore
much of Mr. Kipling's writing from which the taint of
chauvinism is altogether absent — such work as ' In the
Rukh,' or the little tale which has been described, not
unworthily, as ' the best short story in the language,'

* Without Benefit of Clergy;' or such of his verses as

* Recessional ' and ' What the People said ; ' or to forget
the splendid verbal strength and directness which make
even his banalities and vulgarisms more than half
pardonable. So also, in judging Mr. Bernard Shaw,
Buchanan laid stress on the irresponsible cynical
mockery which — if that singularly constructed man of
genius could only be persuaded to see it — is his weak-
ness, rather than on his really admirable powers as a

ROBERT BUCHANAN. ij.

dramatic constructor, and as a writer of trenchant and
characteristic dialogue. It should be added, in justice
both to Buchanan and to Mr, Shaw, that Buchanan
revised — or rather supplemented — his original criticism
by the following lines, published in * The New Rome.'

No Slave at least art thou, on this dull Day

When slaves and knaves throng in Life's banquet-hall! . . ,
Who listens to thy scornful laugh must say

'Wormwood, though bitter, is medicinal !'

Because thou turnest from our feast of Lies

Where prosperous priests with whores and warriors feed.
Because thy Jester's mask hides loving eyes

I name thee here, and bid thy w^ork ' God speed !'

In many a conversation with Buchanan I expressed
my fear that this insistence on the merely ethical
outlook of each individual writer by an authority of his
weight might act rather for evil than for good. It
expressed a mental attitude already too common, to my
thinking, among Englishmen, and it has resulted in the
cases of people of small artistic feeling or culture in
absurdities which have more than once made England
the laughing-stock of the intellectual world. An
extreme case was the publication, a few years ago, of an
edition of ' David Copperfield,' from which the episode
of Steerforth and little Em'ly had been expunged as
unfitted for family reading ! To insist to the English
public on the propagandist duties of the verbal artist
is rather like carrying coals to Newcastle. To mix
a metaphor, the pendulum of English opinion has
always shown a sufficiently marked inclination to the

14 ROBERT BUCHJNAN.

side of ' moral value.' We have, as a nation, at least
enough of the utilitarian, as opposed to the purely
artistic, leaven in our blood, and stand in greater need
of artistic than of moral culture. To persuade
Buchanan either of the truth or the expediency of such
a standpoint was, of course, quite impossible. The
artistic beliefs of such men as he are no more 'idle' than
were the ' manners ' of the Knights of the Table Round,
they are the fruits of a strong personal intelligence,
sedulously cultured.

But, when any great principle was at stake, no man
was less hidebound by preconceptions than Buchanan.
Much as he loved, and fiercely as he defended, certain
minor dogmas, he would forego their interests where
major interests were concerned, as he proved by his
warm defence of Emile Zola, long before that great
writer — and greater Man — had won the suffrage of
every honest man alive by his splendidly heroic defence
and rescue of the unfortunate Dreyfus, and when he
was at the very nadir of English public opinion.

Everybody will remember how, in 1889, the veteran
publicist and historian, Mr. Henry Vizetelly, was con-
demned, through the action of a clique of pestilent busy-
bodies known as the 'National Vigilance Association,'
to a term of imprisonment for publishing translations
of Zola's novels. The Press for the most part
applauded the foolish and tyrannical proceeding, and
Buchanan was the one English man of letters of any
weight or position who resented the barefaced outrage
on literature and liberty. He addressed an open

ROBERT BVCHJNJN. 15

letter, in the form of a pamphlet, to Mr, Henry
Matthews, then Home Secretary, praying, in the
interests of justice and humanity, for Mr. Vizetelly's
release. English officialism could, of course, take no
note of so irregular a plea, however well supported by
logic and eloquence ; but ' On Descending into Hell '
(the pamphlet in question) deserves to take its place
by Milton's ' Areopagitica ' and John Mill's 'Essay on
Liberty ' as an irrefutable argument on the side of
freedom of thought and expression. Had Shakespeare
or Victor Hugo been the insulted author instead of the
writer of * Pot-Bouille ' and * La Terre,' this ' speech for
the defence ' could not have been conducted with closer
reasoning or more generous fervour. ' I affirm,' wrote
Buchanan, ' that Emile Zola was bound to be printed,
translated, read. Little as I sympathise with his views
of life, greatly as I loathe his pictures of human vice and
depravity, I have learned much from him, and others
may learn much ; and had I been unable to read
French, these translations would have been to me an
intellectual help and boon. / like to have the Devil's
case thoroughly stated^ because I know it refutes itself*
As an artist, Zola is unjustifiable ; as a moralist, he is
answerable ; but as a free man, a man of letters, he can
decline to accept the fiat of a criminal tribunal.'
The pamphlet ends with a passage which, for terseness
of argument and cogency of illustration, has few rivals
in nineteenth-century polemical literature : —

* ' Who has ever seen Truth worsted in a fair field ? ' — Milton's
* Areopagitica.'

1 6 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Wholesale corruption never yet came from corrupt liter-
ature, which is the effect, not the cause, of social libertinage.
Do we find morality so plentiful among the godly farmers and
drovers of Annandale, or among the unco' guid of Ayrshire or
Dumfriesshire — thumbers of the Bible, sheep of the Kirk ?
Stands Scotland anywhere but where it did, though it has not
yet acquired an aesthetic taste for the Abominable, but merely
realises occasionally the primitive instincts of La Terre?
Dwells perfect purity in Brittany and in Normandy, despite
the fact that Zola there is an unknown quantity, and Paris
itself a thing of dream ? Bestialism, animalism, sensualism,
realism, call it by what name you will, is antecedent to, and
triumphant over, all books whatsoever. Books may reflect it,
that is all ; and I fail to see why they should not, since it exists,
I love my Burns and like my Byron, though neither was a
virtuous or even a ' decent ' person. My Juvenal, my
Lucretius, my Catullus, and tvenmy porcus porcorum Petronius,
are well read. My Decameron, with all its incidence of
amativeness, is a breeding-nest of poets. Age cannot wither,
nor custom stale. La Fontaine's infinite variety. But I take
such books as these, as I take all such mental food, cum grana
salisy a pinch of which keeps each from corruption. Even
the fly-blown Gautier looks well, cold and inedible, garnished
with Style's fresh parsley. But I have never found that what
my teeth nibble at has any power to pollute my immortal
part, I must stand on the earth, with Montaigne and Rabelais,
but does that prevent me flying heavenward with Jean Paul,
or walking the mountain-tops with the Shepherd of Rydal .?
Inspection of the dung-heaps and slaughter-houses with
Jonathan Swift and Zola only makes me more anxious to
get away with Rousseau to the peaceful height where the
Savoyard Vicar prays. By evil only shall ye distinguish good,
says the Master ; yea, and by the husks shall ye know the grain.

The man who says that a book has power to pollute his
soul, ranks his soul lower than a book. I rank mine infinitely
higher.

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 17

In his generally admirable study, recently
published, entitled ' Robert Buchanan, the Poet of
Revolt,' Mr. Archibald Stodart-Walker says of his
subject that, to the end, he preserved ' an almost
childish sensitiveness to criticism, and a fanatical hatred
to ... . critical injustice.' The second of these
allegations is perfectly true ; the first is a curiously
wrong-headed statement, proceeding as it does from
the pen of a writer who was for some years one of
Buchanan's personal friends. As a matter of fact, I
have never met a man more serenely indifferent to
criticism, merely as criticism, than was Buchanan. That
he waged eternal war with the motley mob of gentle-
men of the Press who chronicle and criticise the
current literature of the day is, of course, matter of
literary history; but the motive of his polemical
activity is to be sought in the second of Mr. Stodart-
Walker's statements, not in the first. Buchanan hated
' critical ' as he hated all other forms of injustice, and
as he hated ignorance, arrogance, presumption, bad
faith, and tawdry, sham enthusiasm, of which elements
latter-day criticism is so largely compact. Elsewhere,
Mr. Stodart-Walker says, ' There is a deadly want of
the sense of humour in attacking criticism as a whole.'
The statement is challengeable, merely as it stands, for
the entire history of criticism — even criticism as
written by men of large powers and wide culture — is
little more than a record of the stupid injustice with
which the world at large has received its greatest and
its best. And criticism ' as she is wrote ' to-day is

c

1 8 ROBERT BUCHANJN.

little more and little else than an impertinence and a
darkening of counsel. Among the thousands of news-
papers published in Great Britain there are few which
do not employ the services of a ' critic,' and, viewed in
the light of that simple fact, criticism, ' as a whole,' is
reduced to an absurdity, inasmuch as the writer
capable of dealing adequately with any book worth
noticing at all is almost as rare a phenomenon as the
writer capable of producing such a book. Nor is
mere incapacity the worst feature of modern criticism
— it becomes easily tolerable when set beside the
cynical defiance of mere common intellectual honesty
which is the stock-in-trade of so many of the critical
tribe. It is a matter of sad fact that — with the
possible exception of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who,
despite his many vulgarisms of manner and the flat
banality of his outlook upon life, has real force
and fine literary power — there is not a contemporary
English author alive to-day under the age of sixty
who approaches the first rank of excellence; yet, to
judge by the current criticism of the newspapers and
reviews we should believe that England was groaning
in a positive plethora of literary genius. We have
been gravely informed — and expected to believe — that
Mr. Rider Haggard was the superior of the elder
Dumas, that the cherry-stone chef d'ceuvres of the late
Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson had quite hid from sight
the granite monoliths which bear witness to the mighty
mallet-hand of Scott, that Mr. George Moore is ' a
greater Zola,' that Mr. Kipling is a ' greater Dickens,'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 19

that Mr. Henry James eclipses Thackeray, that in Mr.
Stephen Phillips we have a dramatic poet who unites
the excellences of Sardou and Tennyson, Milton and
Dumas pere. When the late Hugh Conway died, I read
a sonnet in a professedly literary journal — I refrain
from naming the journal for fear of possible error — in
which he was compared to a ' thunder-smitten eagle ! '
There is probably hardly a journal in England bearing
the date of the day on which I write these words
which is not proclaiming as ' a masterpiece ' some
tawdry performance whose author's name, six months
hence, it will require an effort of memory to recall.
A century ago, in the early days of 'Blackwood's'
and the ' Quarterly,' he was the greatest critic who was
foulest in insult, most careless of decency, who had
stabbed most reputations, who had inspired most
despair in the breast of budding talent. Those bad
old days have vanished, and to-day the greatest critic
is he whose benevolently microscopic eye can
detect the greatest number of ' geniuses ' among the
heterogeneous mob whose crude prose and cruder verse
replenish the shelves of the circulating library. En
revanche, it was only at the moment of Robert
Browning's death that the Press, with anything like
unanimity, hailed him for what he was — one of the
greatest and most certainly enduring glories of English
literature. Buchanan's statement that ' Browning's
life was darkened by constant neglect and infinite
detraction;' and that, ' if it had not been for the efforts
of a small body of devoted worshippers, who preached

20 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Browningese in spite of endless ridicule, he would

scarcely have been heard of by the great public,' is the

simple statement of a simple truth. ' Again and

again, when he was issuing his works of thought and

imagination, he was informed that it was a Poet's

duty, not to instruct, but to amuse, his generation.

A leading critical authority compared him to a noisy

and mannered " Auctioneer." He was requested to

favour the world with light performances, suitable for

the suburban reciter and drawing-room entertainer.

Since he was an eager man among men, en rapport

with everything human, he was described as a worldling

and a diner-out. Suddenly, on his death, the world

discovered that he was a sublime person, a great

person. Column upon column was written in his

praise by gentlemen who had scarcely read one of

his works. " He was great," was the cry, '* bury

him at Westminster." And scarcely was he cold

when it was deeply regretted that he missed wearing

the laurel, still worn, we Poets thank God, by the

Galahad of modern Poesy.' And he — the good and

great Tennyson — how had the current criticism of

his early days received him ? As ' a new star in the

milky-way of poetry,' of which ' Johnny Keats ' was

a specimen-luminary ! It was only when Tennyson

assumed the laurel, ' greener from the brows ' of

Wordsworth — himself too the subject of ' constant

neglect and infinite detraction' — that the critical

snobs recognised his value. Hermann Melville —

Name
The surges trumpet into fame —

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 21

the ' Yankee-Greek,' greatest and best of all writers of
the sea, years ago broke his pen, swearing never more
to write a line ; sick of the futile struggle against the
platitudinous mediocrities bepuffed by the newspaper
critic. ' Imagine this Titan silenced,' said Buchanan,
'and the book-shops flooded with the illustrated
magazines ! ' George Meredith, the possessor of the
widest and acutest intellect which has ever bent itself
to the production of prose fiction, was grey before our
critical ciceroni mentioned — or apparently knew — his
name. Criticism, ' as a whole,' has sought to atone
for insulting or neglecting these men, together with
Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and James Thomson, by
discovering an earth-shaking portent in ' our school-
room classic, Stevenson,' and by deifying the author
of ' Herod.'

That there was a spice of personal feeling in
Buchanan's frequent and furious onslaughts on the
current criticism of his day is true enough. He
would have been something more than mortal man
had it been otherwise. It would be a task as barren
as distasteful to burrow in the sarcophagi of out-
of-date newspapers for specimens of the malicious
detraction and spiteful stupidity with which hordes
of anonymous scribblers greeted his work for many
years. He scored a sweet and decisive revenge about
the year 1873, ^^ which he published his two poems,
' St. Abe and His Seven Wives,' and ' White Rose
and Red.' Both volumes appeared anonymously, and
both were received with roars of applause by journals

22 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

which, till that date, had never failed to stigmatise
their author as ' a pretentious poetaster,' ' a dullard,'
* a madman,' and a condemned Scotsman. As both
were American in subject and story, and possessed
moreover a certain carefully maintained Transatlantic
literary flavour, they were generally ascribed to James
Russell Lowell — one of the few writers of real value for
whom the contemporary Press had much enthusiasm.
One incident in this business afforded Buchanan a great
amount of justifiably malicious satisfaction. A leading
London daily sent a representative to the publisher
of ' St. Abe ' (Mr. Strahan) with a proof of a highly
laudatory review of two columns in length, to ask —
in strict confidence, of course — whether the popular
belief was true, and Lowell was really the author
of the book. Mr. Strahan, meticulously faithfiil to
his pledge of secrecy, declined to answer ' Yea ' or
*Nay;' and no notice at all of the poem appeared in
the columns of the inquisitive journal f Small wonder
that, when a man with such an experience fell foul
of the critical scribes he threw a little extra muscle
into the strokes of the dog-whip. But that Buchanan
was personally sensitive to criticism, printed or spoken,
is a quite mistaken idea. He hailed a critical mis-
statement or stupidity with positive joy, because it
gave him a chance of replying to it, and so afforded
an opportunity for additional exploitation of his idea.
He fell foul of puffery of bad work and of neglect of
good work because, as Mr. Stodart- Walker puts it,
he hated critical injustice, and because nothing gave

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 23

him greater pleasure than to puncture an overblown
reputation — except to vindicate neglected talent. Two
of his utterances in this connexion are memorable,
because they are richly typical of the man who
made them. ' I have my own opinion of myself/
he once remarked in the course of conversation.
* It is a lower one than people might fancy, but it
suffices.' And on another occasion, in answer to a
phrase of condolence regarding a bitter attack upon
one of his books, he wrote, ' My soul will survive
in my poetry, and can take care of itself Sensitive-
ness to criticism is, I fancy, generally allied with
spiritual weakness of some sort, and especially with
vanity. It is the intimate curse of the man who
takes himself more seriously than the ideas he has
to express. A man conscious of having something
to say worth the world's hearing will pretty generally
be prepared, in Buchanan's own phrase, for ' the neglect
of the idle and the misconstruction of the impatient.'*
' My dear Doctor,' said tough old Johnson to the
weeping Goldsmith, 'what man is the worse for
being called Holofernes ? ' There was a strong re-
semblance between the characters of Johnson and
Buchanan. Both were hard hitters, strenuous fighters
for ideas they believed to be true and necessary to be
expressed; both were free from malice because it was
fundamentally to settle the great question, ' What is
right.''' and not the infinitely little question, '■Who

* ' The Outcast.' Epistle Dedicatory.

24 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

is right ? ' that they wrote and argued. Johnson
himself had not a more robust contempt for that
puerile vanity which makes ' intellect ' an excuse for
any weakness or any meanness in the mind of the
fribble who flatters himself that ' intellect ' is the gift
in which he is especially rich. ' I have never yet
discovered/ wrote Buchanan, ' in myself, or in any
man, any gift which entitles me to despise the meanest
of my fellows.'*

To love the worst, to feel
The least is even as I —

to claim no exemption from common labour or
common duty on the ground of superior intelligence,
but rather to demand that a higher intellectuality
should be the corollary of a loftier moral sense —
this was Buchanan's creed. It was the creed he
imported not merely into his daily life, it partly
furnishes the explanation of his huge literary activity.
' I have not escaped the charge of selling my birthright
for a mess of pottage ; of gaining my bread by
hodman's labour, when I might have been sitting

empty-stomached on Parnassus My errors,

however, have arisen from excess of human sympathy,
from ardour of human activity, rather than from any
great love of the loaves and fishes. Lacking the
pride of intellect, I have by superabundant activity
tried to prove myself a man among men, not a mere
litterateur So I have stooped to hodman's work

* ' The Outcast.' Epistle Dedicatory.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 25

occasionally, mainly because I cannot pose in the
god-like manner of your lotus eaters. I have not
humoured my reputation. I have thought no work
undignified which did not convert me into a Specialist
or a Prig. I have written for all men and in all
moods. But the birthright which belongs to all Poets
has never been offered by me in any market, and my
manhood has never been stained by any sham hate
or sham affection.'

Infinite as are the points of diversity between the
poetical literature of the latter half of the nineteenth
century and that of all preceding epochs, there is one
among them which the unborn reader will find supreme
in interest above all others — the intrusion, into the
poetic field, of the polemist and theologian. England
has been described as the native land of paradox, but
among all the paradoxes discoverable in her history there
is none stranger than the indifference of most of her
great poets to the theological struggles whose fluctua-
tions and developments have gone so far towards
making up her national history. It is not, of course,
surprising that Chaucer and his predecessors and
contemporaries should be free from any expression
of theological bias. That Chaucer was a man of
fixed and humble piety is made certain by every
serious page he ever wrote. Being for his day a
man of wide culture, he was probably well read in
the current divinity. But, in Chaucer's day, there
was only one theology, and it was accepted by all

26 ROBERT BUCHANJN.

men. If any manifestation of the spirit of Lollardism
ever came his way, it left him untouched so far as is
discoverable from his writings, and most probably left
him untouched altogether, for he does not seem to
have been of the kind of stuff of which, in any
age, the polemist is made. The good green earth,
and what grew and moved thereon, was enough for
him, as it was enough for his unlettered neighbours,
the farmer in his furrow and the cobbler in his stall.
Life, intellectually and morally, was life reduced to
its simplest terms. The morning prayer, the daily
toil, the well-earned sleep which was the guerdon
of their labour, filled men's lives. They accepted,
with the simplicity of children, the teaching ot
their pastors, that life was a probation, that he
who bore its labours and its trials with patience
and submission would be wafted on the wings of
angels to an eternal paradise, that the wicked and
rebellious would go to people a real objective hell.
It was all so simple : —

The world was rich in man and maid,

With fair horizons bound ;
This whole wide earth of light and shade

Came out a perfect round,

and heaven itself was only a little beyond the sunset

clouds.

Le bon Dieu, gravely interfering

In all humanity's affairs,
Bending his kind grey head, and hearing

The orphan's cry, the widow's prayers.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 27

was, to them, as actual and real a person as his
vicegerent on earth, ' the Pope that dwelled in
Rome,' and not much further off. Chaucer died in
1400, and literature slept for a century, to awaken,
in common with every other manifestation of intellectual
energy, amid the glorious turmoil of the Renaissance ;
and it is at this point in history that the theological
indifFerentism of our great poets becomes so truly
remarkable. For in no field was the human spirit
in the sixteenth century more active than in the
domain of theology. The geographical isolation of
England made us somewhat slow to catch the
contagion of new religious thought. The healthy
conservatism and hatred of extremes joined with the
fundamental tolerance and bonhomie which are
among the best points of our national character to
make the struggle between new and old at once less
bitter and less prolonged than it was in some con-
tinental countries ; yet the fight, while it lasted, was
sharp and bitter enough. But, while Henry and
Edward and Mary and Elizabeth hanged and
burned and racked and tortured; and while the
Continent, from Spain to Friesland, was torn by a
strife as deadly as it has ever witnessed ; the Muse of
English poesy still dreamed on in her own quiet
fairyland, as unmoved by the ghastly turmoil as
Proserpine in her garden. Neither politics nor
theology nor war — for so long a time almost inter-
changeable terms — stirred her from her golden calm.
The glories of a new - found world enriched her

28 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

metaphors and coloured her vocabulary, but, though
all England was shrieking horror over the American
devilries of the Spanish freebooters, she had no word
of pity for outraged humanity. The soil of Holland
was like a sponge blood-soaked with the life-stream of
thousands of the martyrs of the faith which England
had adopted, and Holland's and humanity's greatest
and purest hero was meeting with splendid courage and
defeating with incredible success the tremendous
armaments of Spain, our bitterest enemy, with
whom we also were girding ourselves to come to
inevitable death-grips ; but martyrdom and heroism
and the fear, which all men felt, of Spanish tyranny,
left this strange sprite unmoved. There is nothing so
amazing in all intellectual history as this complete aloof-
ness from every most passionate interest of humanity
which was displayed at that epoch by the great poets
of England. Who, that was ignorant of the date of
Shakespeare, could guess, from any internal evidence
disclosed by his writings, the political storm and stress
by which his life must have been surrounded; or that
his fellow-citizens were being racked, mutilated and
hanged for differences of theological opinion } Unless —
which it is impossible to believe — a score of passages in
his plays are mere fulsome rant meant to tickle the
groundlings, Shakespeare was an ardent patriot. It
would be an even greater absurdity to suppose that
he had neither the heart to sympathise with the
aborigines of America and the Protestants of Holland,
nor the modicum of political sagacity to foresee the

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 29

possibility of curses as dire as those from which they
suffered falling upon his own friends and neighbours.
He must have sympathised with other nations, he must
have feared for the country he loved so well. He
must passionately have desired the triumph of liberty
and the downfall of oppression. Yet where, in the
entire bulk of the work we owe to him, do we find the
smallest indication that he had ever so much as heard
the name of Montezuma, of William the Silent, of
Luther, on the one hand, or of Charles the Fifth or
Philip the Second on the other ? His treatment of the
clerical element in his plays is curiously mild ; the
priestly figures which cross his stage from time to
time, ' Pandulph, of fair Milan Cardinal,' Wolsey and
Campeius and his friars, might, for any internal
evidence yielded by the style of portraiture, have been
painted by the hand of the most fervent Romanist.
Yet he was almost contemporary with Alexander the
Sixth and Cassar Borgia, and actually contemporary
with Cardinal Granvelle, the priestly minister of the
insane and puerile cruelties of Philip; a trio, not
merely of the most unworthy prelates, but of the most
bestial criminals the world has seen. Were these men
and their acts never discussed at the Mermaid, never
canvassed in the tiring-room of the Globe.'' One
might think so, from Shakespeare's public silence
concerning them. And what is true of Shakespeare
in this particular is true of his contemporaries without
exception.

Milton would appear to have been the first English

30 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

poet of real importance to break through the bonds
of this strange reticence, and to bring the light of
the poetic intelligence to bear upon the problems of
his day. His prose ' Areopagitica ' and his noble
sonnet on the persecution of the Protestants of
Piedmont have never been surpassed as instances of
the incommensurable value of the poetic-speculative
treatment of the ' burning questions ' of which every
generation has its share. With him, poetry ceased to
be the mere idle pastime it had been, the poet was no
longer only the denizen and painter of a fairy world
removed from every vital interest of human daily life.
Stony as was the ground on which his seed was fated to
fall, ill-fitted as was the atmosphere of the Restoration
to encourage loftiness of thought or freedom of
expression, the seed was sown, and its own innate
vitality kept it from utter corruption or complete
sterility. The plant was fostered by the literary
harlot, Dryden, and the fungoid growth of affecta-
tion which overspread it during the period of Queen
Anne could not kill it. We smile over the strings of
prim and polished aphorisms in which Pope expressed
his tea-table system of theology and ethics, but his
tinselled and beribboned candlestick served at least to
keep the flame alight, and it burned serenely in the
pages of Cowper, and through that dreary gap in the
succession of genius in which Hayley and Pye and
Crabbe were hailed as poets, to spring to a vivid blaze
in the opening years of the nineteenth century. Keats
is the only indubitably great poet of that epoch who

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 31

was content to dwell in the old celestial lubber-land
in which Shakespeare and Spenser idled away their
time. Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Burns — even the
dreamy and unpractical Coleridge, descended into the
political and theological arenas, and fought in the
ranks of humanity, side by side with common men.
Buchanan's dictum, already quoted, that ' a Poet is
a Prophet and a Propagandist, or nothing,' is only
an exaggeration of what is to-day a universal sentiment.
The mere idle melodist can never hope again to take
rank with the truly great poets. We have seen this
illustrated in the career of one of the most gifted
singers of the century — Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Great in imaginative faculty, rich in melody, a superb
verbal technician, he has failed in holding a place among
the great singers of his time, because, alone among
them, he has had no gospel to proclaim, no message
to deliver. He ranks, as a poet, as Gounod ranks
as a musician. Set beside Browning, Tennyson, and
Buchanan, his stature seems to dwindle to something
less than its true and fair proportion, as Gounod's
delicious melodies seem thin and vapid beside the
graver strains of Beethoven and Wagner.

At the beginning of the present century there was
prevalent a superstition, which found its most lasting
and familiar expression in a famous passage in
Macaulay's ' Essay on Milton,' that the spirit of
science and the spirit of poetry were and must be
inter-destructive, that a civilisation based upon science
must necessarily be incapable of producing great

32 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

poetry. That superstition has long since been aban-
doned, and it is now among the most widespread of
critical commonplaces that out of the fusion of Poetry
and Science will arise a literature nobler than any the
world has yet possessed. That conclusion, we may be
pardoned for thinking, is one that might surely have
been arrived at by the a priori method of reasoning.
All good influences, all forces which make for right-
eousness, are friendly one to another, and must needs
work in harmony. If Science be the bread of life, as it
is, Poetry is its air and sunlight, and, as the body does
not live by bread alone, so the soul will for all time
demand that lighter and less tangible nutriment, which
only imagination can supply. Shakespeare possibly
believed that the swallows which nested in the eaves
of his father's house in summer time took refuge from
the winter's cold under the waters of the horse-pond.
He possibly believed that the witches he drew in
' Macbeth,' the fairies which peopled his ^ Midsummer
Night's Dream,' and the spectres which broke the
sleep of Richard and haunted the midnight watch of
Marcellus had their genuine counterparts in the
actual economy of nature. Tennyson was a scientific
ornithologist, to whom the horsepond-hibernation
theory would hardly appeal, but nevertheless he wrote
about the swallow one of the sweetest lyrics in the
language. He probably had no belief in ghosts,
but he used them as powerfully as if he had, in the
last act of ' Harold.' The mind of man is tenacious
of all that is of mental or imaginative value, and

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 33

even the most modern of readers is content to go
back for a while into the region of ghosts and ghouls
in the company of any guide who has the art to
make his spooks sufficiently convincing. Science
and imagination can never be really inimical one to
another.

Macaulay was a young man when he propounded
the theory just briefly discussed; he had grown old
when a vastly more venerable bugbear was disinterred
from among the ashes of the past, and the cry rang
shrilly from all the churches and conventicles of Europe
and America, that Science was killing Religion. It was
certainly killing much that passed by that name, and
the holocausts of superstitions by which its march was
marked were no doubt very terrible to that numerous
body to whom the sanctity of superstition meant daily
bread. The militant Atheist, who would appear at
times to be a sillier— and even less decent — person than
his enemy, the dogmatic religionist, fell into the same
obvious pitfall, and from the depths of his ignorance
clamoured his glee in the ' destruction ' of Religion as
loudly as the priest and the parson wailed their grief
and terror. There is an illuminating passage regarding
this matter in Buchanan's article on ' Free Thought in
America ' (^A Look Round Literature)^ apropos of the
utterances of that once notorious atheistic lecturer.
Colonel Robert Ingersoll : —

Colonel Ingersoll is very fond of proclaiming his admiration
for the great scientific teachers of his age ; but in reality he is
as far away in spirit from the thought of Darwin as from the

D

34 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

vision of Shakespeare, as obtuse to the scientific problems as to
the pathetic poetic fallacy. Religion is the grave, elder
daughter of Poetry, and to understand religious questions
a man must have the heart of a poet. Science, too, is the
daughter of Poetry ; indeed, her youngest born ; vv^hile calmer
and colder than her mother, she has the same far-away, rapt
look into the heaven of heavens j and her teaching is for
poetic hearts also, not for those who confound her with her
sordid and hard-working handmaid, Invention. Science ranges
the universe, touches the farthest suns, reaches the farthest
cloud confines, and cries honestly and loudly, * Thus far — no
farther — here I pause ; ' and then even she begins to dream.
Invention squats on the ground, sets her little water-wheel,
lights her little lamp, pieces her mechanical puzzles, does
homely work, delightful and useful to everybody. But
Invention-worship is fetish-worship, and Colonel Ingersoll is
a fetish-worshipper — that is to say, an individual exactly at the
savage state where neither religion nor science begins.

' The last word of science,' said George Henry
Lewes to Buchanan on one occasion, when the latter
had asked if that ' last word ' would be one of nega-
tion and despair, ' will not be spoken for many a
century yet. Who can guess what it will be ? '
Meanwhile, and pending that far-off consummation,
the wise man who gives himself time to think will
arrive at the comforting conclusion that, no more
than Science and Imagination, can Science and Reli-
gion be truly inimical. Science is no horrible Djinn,
solidified from the smoke of our nineteenth-century
retorts, like the imprisoned demon of the ' Arabian
Nights ' from the vapour of his bottle. It is coeval
with humanity, and therefore coeval with Religion
itself. Some Religion Man must always have had,

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 35

there is no race so low in the scale as to have none
at all. Some Science Man must always have possessed
— how otherwise should he have lived at all ?
Religion is eternal — the holocaust of creeds leaves
her untouched, nay, it has imparted to her new
strength and vitality, as the lopping away of vege-
table parasites quickens the vigour of a forest tree.
I have already set in juxtaposition the names of
the three poets of the Victorian era who are, as I
believe, securest of posthumous regard — the names of
Tennyson, Browning, and Buchanan — and I have tried
at least to adumbrate the reasons which prompt me to
that selection. The conditions of the contest for the
crown of poetic supremacy have changed from what
they were in former times. That crown is awarded
no longer to him who is merely the sweetest singer
of his generation — otherwise the public vote would
place it on the head of Mr. Swinburne. A sweet
singer, a poet in the old restricted sense, every candi-
date who aspires to wear it must needs still — and
always — be. But he must be very much beside and
beyond that. He must combine, with the purely
poetic gift, the gifts of the historian, the sociologist,
the philosopher, the theologian, the legislative re-
former. He must absorb and render back the desires
and aspirations of his generation, and indicate the road
that it must walk in its progress towards their realisa-
tion ; his utterance must be not only a sweet sound
in men's ears, but a guiding light unto their feet.
And it is because the three poets I have named

36 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

combined each in his individual person and expressed
each in his proper work, the gifts here dwelt upon,
that their influence on the minds and lives of men is
certain to endure.

The critical superstition of Macaulay's earlier days,
that Science and Poetry are necessarily antagonistic,
had, and still has to many minds, a surface plausibility.
The poetic and religious spirits are more nearly akin
than the poetic and scientific, and if science necessarily
ended in atheism, the Poets would never have had
much to say to it. An atheistic poet was, a generation
ago, almost a contradiction in terms. The Poet felt
with Browning's ' Bishop Blougram ' : —

What can I gain on the denying side ?
Ice makes no conflagration.

There was but one genuine and indubitable English
poet who ever went so far as even to mistake himself
for an atheist — Shelley. And if the ' Adonais ' is of
any authority, Shelley, towards the end of his life,
had drifted at least as far as Theism : —

The one remains, the many change and pass,
God for all time abides, earth's shadows flee —

and long after Shelley's time, and even to the present
day, the poets who have believed that science had
robbed them of God, have proclaimed themselves the
most desolate of orphans. The melancholy end of
Alfred de Musset was as clearly traceable to the
assumed impossibility of religious belief as to any

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 37

one of the more frequently cited causes. His pages
are full of laments for the lost Fatherhood, and he
attacked Voltaire with a virulence rarely lavished on
any but a contemporary enemy.

Dors-tu content, 6 Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire
Voltige-t-il encore sur tes os decharnes ?

Ton siecle, dit-on, etait trop jeune pour te lire —
Le notre doit te plaire, et tes hommes sont nes.

La Mort devait t'attendre avec impatience

Pendant quatre-vingt ans que tu lui fis ta cour.

And again :

Et que nous reste-t-il, a nous, les deicides ?
Pour qui travailliez-vous, demolliseurs stupides,
Lorsque vous dissequiez le Christ sur son autel?

And de Musset's great and strangely neglected con-
temporary, Auguste Barbier, was even less polite to
Voltaire's memory, when he called him

Singe assis sur les decombres —
Marteau encore brulant de demolition.

Baudelaire complained :

Je suis ne trop tard dans un siecle trop vieux —

feeling, as a Godless poet of his time must have felt,
like a worshipper with his hands full of incense who
can find no altar whereon to lay it. Verlaine, in his
unregenerate days, ranked himself with as much sad-
ness as pride among

les supremcs poctcs,
Qui vcncrons les dieux et qui n'y croyons pas.

38 ROBERT BVCHANAN.

The crushing sense of the orphaned condition of
humanity drove James Thomson to the fallacious
comfort of alcohol, and sent him to the grave. It is
curious to remember, in this connexion, that Voltaire
wrote the wistful and charming quatrain :

On a banni les demons et les fees,
Le raisonneur tristement s'accredite :

On court, helas, apres la verite,

Ah, croyez-moi, I'erreur a son merite.

It is even more curious to remember that he
penned the lines —

Le passe n'est pour nous qu'un triste souvenir ;
Le present est afFreux, s'il n'est point d'avenir,
Si la nuit du tombeau detruit I'etre qui pense —

but the lines are his, none the less, and would seem
to indicate that ' the great architect of ruin ' knew
moments in which he doubted the sanity and justice
of the task he performed with so terrible a com-
pleteness. This fear of the destructive tendencies of
science — a fear which blinded men of less clear
mental insight to its constructive value — is strongly
evident in the work of both Browning and Tennyson.
Both were ardent students of the most advanced
thought of their time, and each, in his^ fashion,
fought in the ranks of religious conservatism.

It is quite a common thing, even to-day, to hear
Browning spoken of as 'a Christian poet.' That
claim was made, with obvious sincerity, by Richard

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 39

Hutton in the columns of the Spectator^ and quite
recently I re-read the article, which has been re-
published by Hutton's literary executor in a volume
entitled 'Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought.'*
That claim seems as strange and as wildly untenable
as any claim well could be. That the average reader
— perhaps even the average reader of Browning —
should make or admit it is no great wonder. But
that a man of Hutton's critical capacity should be
the victim of such a delusion is curious indeed.
Hutton admits that ' Browning was very jealous of its
being supposed that he accepted literally the cut-and-
dried formulas of any Christian Church.' A few lines
further on, he continues, ' In " Saul," in " Christmas
Eve and Easter Day," in " The Ring and the Book,"
and fifty other poems. Browning has endeavoured to
depict the very heart of his own faith, and of course
he prefers his own mode of indicating that faith to
that of the narrow-minded Evangelical preacher, or the
technical scholastic theologian, or the cold rationalistic
critic. No doubt,' Hutton goes on, ' he told Mr.
Buchanan that in his (Mr. Buchanan's) sense of the
term, he did not profess to be a Christian ; but, as
Mrs. Sutherland Orr puts it, we want to know exactly
what meaning Mr. Buchanan had put upon the term,
before we can attach any great importance to this
asserted denial.'

It is strange, to say the least of it, that Mrs.

* Messrs. Macmillan (Evcrslcigh Scries).

40 ROBERT BUCHANJN.

Sutherland Orr should have made such a remark, and
stranger still that Hutton should have repeated it.
For, if one thing in Buchanan's theological scheme is
more plain and explicit than another, it is the scientific
rigidity of his definition of the word ' Christian.'
Christianity, Buchanan was never tired of repeating, is
a number of dogmas, accurately summed up in the
Credo taught to children. Do you believe in the
Immaculate Conception and in the efficacy of the
Atonement ? If so, you are a Christian. If not, you
may be anything else you choose to call yourself, but a
Christian you are not. You may love and admire the
character of Christ, you may preach and practise the
virtues He extolled, but nothing short of the definite
acceptance of the dogmas of the Godhead and the Re-
demption can qualify you to stand within the Christian
pale.* It was in that plain sense that Browning under-
stood Buchanan's categorical inquiry, ' Are you not,

* Some six or seven years ago, Mr. Richard Le Gallienne gave
Buchanan an additional chance of insisting on this hard-and-fast
definition by the publication of his book, 'The Religion of a Literary
Man,' vi^herein, having carefully ruled himself out of acceptance of
any sort of dogma whatsoever, he described himself as 'essentially a
Christian ;' after which feather-headed pronouncement he went off,
as Buchanan said, ' to tipple and flirt in the society of that arch-
materialist, Omar Khayyam.' Mr. Le Gallienne's claim to stand
within the Christian fold provoked the elder poet to the committal
of a bit of rollicking verse, which appeared originally in the Star
newspaper, and was afterwards incorporated in ' The Devil's Sabbath '
[Tke New Rome).

If I desire to end my days at peace with all theologies.
To win the penny-a-liner's praise, the Editor's apologies.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 41

then, a Christian ? ' And it was with a full sense of
the meaning his reply would bear in Buchanan's mind
that Browning replied — ' thundered ' is Buchanan's
expression — ' No ! ' And, in the circumstance that
Buchanan, knowing Browning's work so well as he
did, should have felt the need to ask such a question
at all; and in that other circumstance, that, with
Browning's reply on record before him, Hutton could
still, sincerely (as I have already said), and with any
chance of finding agreement with the view, still claim
Browning as a Christian poet, lies matter for interest-
ing reflection, as we shall presently perceive.

Browning wrote much on theological subjects.
His early education, his serious cast of mind, the
very character of his genius, all tended to make
theological speculation interesting to him. Even the
most meagre citation of the passages in which he
treated of the eternal mysteries and of men's guesses

Don't think I mean to cast aside the Christian's pure beatitude.
Or cease my vagrant steps to guide with Christian prayer and platitude.
No, I'm a Christian out and out, and claim the kind appellative
Because, however much I doubt, my doubts are simply Relative ;
For this is law, and this I teach, tho' some may think it vanity,
That whatsoever creed men preach, 'tis Essential Christianity !

In Miracles I don't believe, or in Man's Immortality —
The Lord was laughing in his sleeve, save when he taught Morality ;
He saw that flesh is only grass, and (though you grieve to learn it) he
Knew that the personal Soul must pass and never reach Eternity.
In short, the essence of his creed was gentle nebulosity
Compounded for a foolish breed who gaped at his verbosity ;
And this is law, and this I teach, tho' you may think it vanity,
That whatsoever creed men preach, 'tis Essential Christianity !

42 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

at their meaning would absorb a quite disproportionate
amount of space, and I shall select as my field of
quotation those only of his poems which contain the
fullest and directest expression of his attitude towards
the question of the divine birth and ambassadorship
of Christ, Among these, Hutton mentions ' Saul,'
' Christmas Eve and Easter Day,' and ' The Ring and
the Book/ Let us examine them,

' Saul ' contains one passage, and only one, which,
taken apart from its context and from the entire
atmosphere of the poem, can possibly be regarded as
an affirmation of the divinity of Christ.

'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for ! my flesh, that I

seek
In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it ! O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee ; a Man like to me
Thou shalt love, and be loved by, for ever : a Hand like this

hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the

Christ stand !

Taken as an isolated statement, nothing could be
completer, nothing more splendidly fervent, as a
proclamation of the godhead of Christ. But it cannot
be so taken. It must be examined as part of a whole,
and so examined it ceases to be a confession of personal
faith on the part of its writer, and becomes a mere bit
of literature. For the utterance is dramatic, and the
speaker is not Robert Browning, but David the shepherd
minstrel. It is of no more authority as evidence that
its author was an Orthodox Christian than Tennyson's

ROBERl BUCHANAN. 43

* Tithonus ' could be in supporting the thesis that the
late Laureate was an Hellenic Pantheist. And pre-
cisely the same thing may be said of the passages which
were in Hutton's mind when he spoke of ' The Ring
and the Book.' They also are purely dramatic, and
Browning's own personal theology finds less expression
in the scholarly subtleties of the good Pope Innocent
than in the simple, childlike trustfulness of poor
Pompilia, praying on her hospital bed for the wretch
who murdered her : —

We shall not meet in this world or the next,
But where will God be absent ? In His light
Is healing, in His shadow, healing too —
Let Guido touch the shadow, and be healed.

Before passing on to ' Christmas Eve and Easter
Day,' let us look for a moment at some other of his
theological pronouncements. It has been stated that
' only a Christian could have written " A Death in
the Desert." ' The only meaning this statement can
be taken as bearing is that nobody but a Christian
could have felt the fervid love for and belief in
Christ which Browning expresses by the lips of the
dying John. But in this poem we must again notice
that it is dramatic, not lyrical. In the body of the
poem it is the voice of the Apostle, in the appended
passage it is the voice of Pamphylax the Antiochene.
And in that addendum there is a statement, more
direct and forceful than any made by John upon the
other side, of the difficulty, to a mere human, logical

44 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

intelligence, of accepting the splendid promises of
Christ : —

If Christ, as thou affirmest, be of men

Mere man, the first and best, but nothing more —

Account Him, for reward of what He was,

Now and forever, wretchedest of all.

For see ; Himself conceived of life as love,

Conceived of love as what must enter in,

Fill up, make one with His each soul He loved :

Thus much for man's joy, all men's joy for Him.

Well, He is gone, thou sayest, to fit reward.

But by this time are many souls set free.

And very many still retained alive :

Nay, should His coming be delayed awhile,

Say, ten years longer (twelve years, some compute)

See if, for every finger of thy hands.

There be not found, that day the world shall end.

Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ's word

That He will grow incorporate with each.

With me as Pamphylax, with him as John,

Groom for each bride ! Can a mere man do this ?

Yet Christ saith, this He lived and died to do.

Call Christ, then, the illimitable God,

Or lost !

There is a direct, a terrible simplicity in this
exposition of doubt which is quite absent from John's
proclamation of belief. That proclamation is subtle,
ingenious, eloquent to a high degree — the very per-
fection of polemics; but in the force of its appeal to
human understanding it is no more comparable to the
passage I have quoted than is a flight of thistledown
to a volley of grapeshot. True, the addendum has
itself an addendum, in the words completing the last

ROBERT BV CHAN AN. 45

line of the poem — ' But 'twas Cerinthus that is lost.'
Yet those few words — even if I am wrong in taking
them also as a dramatic utterance added by some later
commentator than ' Pamphylax the Antiochene ' — are
little to set against the appallingly plain statement
of the difficulty of belief And if they are to be taken
as expressing Browning's personal adherence to Christian
dogma, all that can be said is that they form the only
definite proclamation of that adherence to be found
in the whole range of his poetical work.

' Christmas Eve,' and, in a less measure, * Easter
Day,' are certainly Browning's most important con-
tributions to theological literature. They owe
something of that importance to the fact that they
are the longest of his works which treat of theological
ideas, and most of it to the other fact that they are
personal, not dramatic, utterances. Let us see on
which side they testify most strongly. In * Christmas
Eve,' the poet is transported in his trance to the
lecture room in Gottingen, and listens to the address
delivered by ' the hawk-nosed, high-cheekboned
Professor,' who, after demolishing the divine claims
of Christ by a cannonade of Teutonic-scientific criticism,
tells his audience that the ' myth ' thus pulverised still
leaves, ' for residuum,'

A man ! a right, true man, however,
Whose work was worthy a man's endeavour j
Work, that gave warrant almost sufficient

To his disciples, for rather believing
He was just omnipotent and omniscient,

46 ROBERT BUCHANJN.

As it gives to us, for as frankly receiving
His word, their tradition — which, though it meant
Something entirely different
From all that those who only heard it.
In their simplicity thought and averred it,
Had yet a meaning quite as respectable —

at which point the poet follows his divine Guide out
into the darkness, and, as he flies through the air in
His wake, muses on the Professor's lecture. * Thus
much of Christ does he (the Professor) reject ? ' asks
Browning —

And what retain ? His intellect ?
What is it I must reverence duly ?
Poor intellect for worship, truly,
Which tells me simply what was told

(If mere morality, bereft

Of the God in Christ, be all that's left)
Elsewhere by voices manifold ;
With this advantage, that the stater

Made nowise the important stumble

Of adding, he, the sage and humble.
Was also one with the Creator.
You urge Christ's followers' simplicity :

But how does shifting blame evade it ?
Have Wisdom's words no more felicity ?

The stumbling-block, his speech, who made^it \
How comes it that, for one found able
To sift the truth of it from fable,
Millions believe it to the letter ?
Christ's goodness, then — does that fare better ?
. Strange goodness, which, upon the score

Of being goodness, the mere due
Of man to fellow-man, much more

To God — should take another view

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 47

Of its possessor's privilege,
And bid him rule his race !

*****

The goodness — how did he acquire it ?
Was it self-gained, did God inspire it ?
Choose which ; then tell me, on what ground
Should its possessor dare propound
His claim to rise o'er us an inch ?

Were goodness all some man's invention,

Who arbitrarily made mention
What we should follow, and whence flinch —
What qualities might take the style

Of right and wrong — and had such guessing

Met with as general acquiescing
As graced the alphabet erewhile.
When A got leave an Ox to be.
No Camel (quoth the Jews) like G, —
For thus inventing thing and title
Worship were that man's fit requital.
But if the common conscience must
Be ultimately judge, adjust
Its apt name to each quality
Already known — I would decree
Worship for such mere demonstration.

And simple work of nomenclature,

Only the day I praised, not Nature,
But Harvey, for the circulation.

If this passage can be accused of obscurity, it is
only of such obscurity as even cultured people who
have not made themselves familiar with Browning's
occasional jerkiness of utterance often complain of —
the obscurity is merely verbal. That small difficulty
conquered, the thought of this passage is as simple,
plain, and direct as thought can be. And it is a

48 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

denunciatory criticism of the claims of Christ, even to
the measure of merely human greatness which the
Atheistic Professor left to him, to which most other
diatribes of the kind in modern literature are mere
child's play. It says, with a plainness which leaves
no chance for quibbling, that if Christ were not God,
he was little more than nothing ; it grudges him even
a place among great ethical teachers. 'Ah, but,' you
can hear the Christian claimant of Browning replying,
' Browning goes on to reconstruct the Divine Figure.
Read the end of the poem.' You can read the end ot
the poem. You can read it with a microscope, and
there is absolutely no reconstruction of the divinity of
Christ to be found in it. It is merely nebulous rhetoric.
It is impossible to print here the following and con-
cluding passages, which make some hundreds of lines.
Nor is it necessary. The onus of proof lies on the
critics who claim Browning as a Christian poet. Let
one among them cite, either from ' Christmas Eve ' or
from any other of his utterances, any passage on their
side as plain, direct, logical, and indubitable in meaning
as those quoted in support of the contrary affirmation.

In the course of his essay Hutton says, ' It is as
plain as vivid imaginative expressions can make it, that
if Browning was not in some very deep and true sense
a Christian — a believer even in the divinity of Christ
— his language is elaborately adapted rather to conceal
and misrepresent his mind than to express it ' — a
remark which seems to me a little shallow and lacking
in critical insight. There is no need to conclude that

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 49

Browning was so untrue to his genius and manhood as
to palter with us in a double sense on the gravest of all
human problems. I am not defending him from that
injurious charge from any sentimental belief that a
great brain must needs mean great courage and great
honesty. On the contrary, it seems to me that what
we call ' great men,' taken in the lump, have been
pretty poor specimens of humanity. The simple ex-
planation of Browning's ambiguity in his theological
utterances is as follows. He was strongly attracted
by theological questions, by the Divine Mysteries, and
loved to think and write about them. He believed —
passionately, whole-heartedly believed — in God, and in
God's personal supervision of the world. About that
at least, any shadow of doubt is impossible to any
intelligent student of his poetry, and his letters to
Elizabeth Barrett testify to it almost on every page.
And he would have loved to believe in Christ, to
have accepted the Divine Legend in its entirety.
But that he could not do, the character of his intelli-
gence, the strain of tough logicality which ran through
his mind, forbade it. There was in Browning a dual
personality, the poet who longed to believe, the logician
who clamoured for absolute demonstration. He had
not the heart to attack overtly so beautiful a creed
as Christianity, and he could not keep his pen from
writing about it. So he found a keen delight in ex-
pressing his love for the character of Christ in the form
in which it could be expressed most completely — by
dramatic utterances put into the mouths of men of

E

50 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

absolute and unquestioning faith. Read in the light
of that belief, his work contains a pathetic beauty, an
adumbration of the great heart-hunger of our orphaned
and sorrowful humanity. There is one dramatic utter-
ance of Browning's in which he did indeed speak
his whole heart — the final lines of the 'Epistle' of
Karshish, the wandering Arab physician, who had met
and talked with Lazarus, the living witness of the
miraculous power of Christ.

The very God ! think, Abib, dost thou think ?
So, the All-Great, were the All-loving too —
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here !
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor may conceive of mine.
But love I gave thee, with myself to love.
And thou must love me who have died for thee ! '

The madman saith He said so ; it is strange.

Karshish, one may say, is the veritable Browning
himself, the eager student and close cross-questioner of
Nature, hoping that his pryings into natural secrets
may one day give him certainty of the existence of
some stronger divine sanction than his iron logic will
yet permit him to believe in.

But, though Browning cannot be found 'guilty' on
the alternative charge which Hutton brought against
him — the charge of consciously paltering in his written
utterances with what he personally regarded as the
gravest of all human problems, there is a minor
accusation from which he would have found it difficult

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 51

to free himself. The fact remains that many of his
readers claim him as a Christian poet, and that such
a classification was sufficiently plausible to find endorse-
ment by a man of the critical acumen of Hutton.
That Browning refrained from writing, in his own
proper person, any word which could be accepted as
proclaiming the validity of the Christian hope is in
itself enough to acquit him of the grievous stigma of
having pandered to popular sentiment, or of designedly
misleading his readers. But that was not enough. The
man who, being asked in private conversation, ' Are
you not a Christian ? ' could ' thunder ' so decisive a
negative, should not have permitted his sentimental
or aesthetic leanings to make so vital a matter at all
questionable in his public utterances. This is a point
of cardinal importance. It proves in Browning a
lack of that completer moral courage exhibited by his
two most prominent rivals in the field of poetical
polemics, Tennyson and Buchanan, about whose con-
victions on kindred topics it would be impossible for
any reader of average intelligence to harbour the
smallest uncertainty. And it has the flirther disquiet-
ing effect of provoking doubt as to whether ' the poet
of optimism par excellence^' as Browning has been called,
was thoroughly sincere in his eternal cry of ' Sursum
corda ! ' One cannot but ask oneself if it was indeed
possible that a man of the world, ' an eager man among
men ' of whom it was as impossible to predicate ignor-
ance of the actualities of life as lack of intelligence to
understand them, should really be so blind to the sin

52 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and misery, the filth and failure, the injustice, the

brutality, the hydra-headed horror which dominates

existence. His optimism was not merely robust, it

was at moments positively impertinent. To read

Browning in sickness or in great sorrow or physical

suffering —

when the sensuous frame

Is racked by pangs that conquer trust ;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust.

And Life, a Fury slinging flame —

would drive a sensitive organization to stark madness.
There are moments when the statement ' God's in his
heaven ' seems questionable to the staunchest believer,
as we know it did at moments even to John Henry
Newman. And there are frequent moments when
' All's right with the world ! ' is a gratuitous insult
to common sense and common eyesight. Optimism is
no doubt a virtue, of sorts, but pushed too far it
becomes, not optimism, but insensibility — to use na
harsher word.

Very different was the regard with which Tenny-
son looked upon the world ; far more valuable to
heart and brain was the verdict he pronounced on
the strange inchoate drama we call ' Life.' An
optimist to the end, his optimism, less insistent and
less loud than the violent asseveration of Browning,
' All's love and all's law,' brings a more real comfort
with it, for we feel that it is based, not on an almost
brutal denial of the reality of pain and disappointment,
but on a frank recognition of all the phenomena of life.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 53

Tennyson's intellectual courage was far from complete,
he was not armed at all points, he made, as we shall
see, unjustifiable reservations and claims philosophically
inadmissible ; but the great grief of his life was, in-
tellectually, life's greatest boon to him — it forced a
naturally reverent and rather timid soul to face and
£ght ' the spectres of the mind,' and to tell his gener-
ation, with a beautiful and noble candour, the progress
and the issue of the struggle. He was by far the most
powerful advocate of revealed religion produced by the
nineteenth century, simply because he brought to his
task not merely his consummate literary ability, but
so large a share of candour to his opponents ; so frank
a recognition of much that was true in their teaching;
so free a confession of the doubts and difficulties which
assailed, but could not kill, his faith in the eternal
Fatherhood. He realised, as Browning in his own
person certainly never did, the thought which Browning
so splendidly expresses by the lips of Bishop Blougram ;

When the fight begins within himself

A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,

Satan looks up beneath his feet — both tug —

He's left, himself, i' the middle : the soul wakes

And grows. Prolong that battle through his life !

Never leave growing till the life to come.

The sum of all is — yes, my doubt is great.
My faith's still greater, then, my faith's enough.

All his life long, though he kept his eyes resolutely

54 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

fixed upon the sunlit mountain summits, Tennyson's
feet trod the thorny ways of the Valley of the Shadow.
Granted foreknowledge of his love for Arthur Hallam
and the tragic end of that heroic friendship, ' In
Memoriam ' might have been prophesied from the pen
which wrote ' The Two Voices ' and ' Maud.'

A still small voice spoke unto me —
' Thou art so full of misery
Were it not better not to be ? '

A life of nothings, nothing worth,
From that first nothing ere his birth
To that last nothing under earth.

He found an answer to the dull murmur within his
heart, but the answer was hardly satisfactory, and the
spectre of doubt was never finally laid. It reared its-
head again in ' Maud,' and made of ' the brave o'er-
hanging firmament, fretted with golden fire' a terrible
witness to human insignificance : —

A sad astrology — the boundless plan
That made you tyrants in your iron skies,
Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes,
Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand
His nothingness into man.

And we may be certain that when, many years later, he
wrote that terrible poem ' Despair,' the utterance was
not merely and wholly dramatic, but that, though it
probably did not express the mood in which it was

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 55

actual] y written, its bitterness was inspired by memories
of many hours of torturing personal doubt.

And the suns of the limitless Universe sparkled and shone in

the sky,
Flashing with fires as of God ; but we know that their light was

a lie —
Bright as with deathless hope — but, however they sparkled and

shone
The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of

woe like our own —
No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below,
A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe.

He often felt chilled and homeless in the vastnesses of
Time and Space : —

Many an vEon moulded earth before her highest, Man, was

born.
Many an .^on too may pass when earth is manless and

forlorn,

and at moments they so crushed him that he breaks
out with a cry of angry contempt of himself and the
impotent race to which he belongs,

What is it all but the trouble of ants, in the gleam of a million
million of suns ?

It is impossible not to recognise and admire the courage
which goes so far, which does not shrink from posing,
squarely and honestly, some of the more powerflil
reasons for doubt and denial. It is certainly in no
carping or malicious spirit that I venture to criticise the
faith of such a man, or the processes by which he
arrived at that faith. When all possible exceptions and

56 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

all fair deductions have been made, the bulk of Tenny-
son's utterances upon the problems of his century will
remain a document of the highest value. He failed to
speak the final word — not the final word of a
controversy which will probably still be raging when
the sun goes out — but the final word which it is within
the power of the humblest of us to speak, the final word
of individual opinion ; because, with that timidity which
was one of the few flaws of a conspicuously noble
nature, he did not dare to follow his brains, to trust
his intelligence in the denial of much which his heart so
passionately desired. So deep a student and so reverent
a lover of Tennyson as Mr. Masterman is forced to
admit so much : —

Tennyson, in fact, in his treatment of contemporary life
around him, directly opposes the principle of Evolution which,
in theory, he had accepted. In religious speculation, and in
practical affairs, he never did actually launch out into the
deep. He always was one of those who hugged the shore,
ever directing the prow of his ship towards the illimitable
ocean, but ever again seeking shelter under the shadow of the
land.*

Mr. Masterman is so valuable a witness that I shall
make no apology for quoting rather freely from his
book — the most admirable critical utterance regarding
Tennyson with which I am acquainted, and one of the
most capable and luminous critical exercises in the
language. Here, for instance, is a passage which

* ' Tennyson as a Religious Teacher,' by Charles F. G.
Masterman.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 57

sheds a penetrating light on much of Tennyson's
philosophy : —

Tennyson's first attempts to solve this great problem (the
apparent vastness of the Universe and the insignificance of
Man) consist of mere affirmation v^^ithout explanation — affirma-
tion of the reality of self through the reality of love. He
deliberately turns away from the immensity of Space, and
refuses any longer to contemplate it. I am : I love : this, at

least, is certain This is the reply of the hero of

* Maud ' to the maddening thoughts suggested by his ' sad
astrology.'

But now shine on, and what care I,

Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl.
The countercharm of space and hollow sky,
And do accept my madness, and would die

To save from one slight shame one simple girl.

But in this first attempt to encounter the problem the
human intellect cannot rest satisfied ; it must go forward in
an effort to escape from this unsatisfactory dualism, the reality
of the macrocosmos without us, the reality of the microcosmos
within. The mind incessantly craves for some kind of
harmony, and refuses to acquiesce in the discord between
these two entities, and so Tennyson was compelled to essay an
explanation. He found it in the form of idealism taught by
that philosopher who had never wearied of contemplating the
sublimity both of the starry heavens without and the moral law
within. This was the assertion of the subjective element in
space ; that space is not a reality outside our own conscious-
ness, but, at least as apprehended by us, a product of this
consciousness itself

* Space is nothing but the form of all phenomena of the
external senses,' says Kant ; * it is the subjective condition of
our sensibility, without which no external intuition is possible

58 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

for US;' and again, *If we drop our subject, or the subjective
form of our senses, all qualities, all relations of objects in Space
and Time, nay, Space and Time themselves, would vanish.'

The world as we know it, the whole material universe,
Tennyson maintains, is but a vision or a picture in our minds
and the minds of beings possessing organizations similar to our
own. Impressions have rained down upon us from something
beyond ourselves ; each of us has woven these impressions into
a unity, which he terms the Natural World. How different
this may be from the real world outside ourselves we cannot
at present apprehend ; but we can at least emphasise the im-
possibility of being content with the first naive view of things,,
the impossibility of the assertion that this manifestation of
consciousness must possess a real tangible existence outside the
minds which apprehend it. In this sense it is untrue to affirm
that humanity could be removed from the solar system without
making any practical difference in the economy of the universe \
for if all consciousness were simultaneously to cease, the whole
material system would suddenly disappear ; ' the great globe
itself and all which it inherit ' would vanish like a dream,
leaving ' not a rack behind.' *

This indeed seems to me to be a case in which

Physic of metaphysic begs defence,
And metaphysic calls for aid on sense —

and the call is disregarded. There is, of course, no
appeal, in the realm of pure reason, from Kant's
pronouncement. Time and Space must be regarded,
for purposes of thought, as mere emanations of the
human intelligence, mere abstractions, having no
necessary — perhaps no probable — relationship to the

* ' Tennyson as a Religious Teacher.'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 59

actual scheme of the universe. But to transplant that
idea from its native realm, and to attempt to base upon
it a plan of daily action, is impossible. For, if Space
and Time are merely human ideas, why should we
grant the objective existence of those 'beings possess-
ing organizations similar to our own,' whose reality
Tennyson — and apparently Mr. Masterman — some-
what unphilosophically take for granted.^ Meta-
physically, my fellow men are as merely ' phenomena '
as the stars in the sky or the figures on the dial, and,
so viewed for the purposes of my daily life, can have
no possible claim on my consideration. Unless I
grant the real, objective existence of my neighbour, and
his capacity to suffer as I suffer and to enjoy as I
enjoy, where is my moral obligation to take him into
account at all ? Good metaphysics may be very
questionable common sense. Laugh as we may at old
Samuel Johnson smiting the table to prove the
existence of matter, we must all literally accept his
ruling in our daily life. ' The universe,' says Mr.
Masterman, ' need no longer affright us through its
greatness,' but I fear he will find few to echo the senti-
ment, or to discover in his proff^ered solution any
comfort which will survive a moment's thought. De
deux choses^ rune — the entire macrocosm, of which
Time and Space are but the vastest features, and which
includes Man as it includes them, is real or a dream.
One cannot choose portions of such a whole and deny
to them an objective reality granted to the rest.

Mr. Masterman, having exhibited the process by

6o ROBERT BUCHANAN.

which Tennyson exorcised the disquieting phantom of
* Vastness,' proceeds, in the second chapter of his book,
to discuss that by which he arrived at the ' Faith '
which he made it his lifelong task to inculcate in the
mind of his generation. Here again it will be well to
let Mr. Masterman speak for himself and his great
subject.

We have reduced everything, says Mr. Masterman, to two
fundamental propositions, and these appear mutually destructive.
On the one hand, that the Universe is fundamentally perfect;
on the other, the presence of imperfection : in theological
language, the existence of God and the existence of evil. And
apparently w^e can go no further. We can retrace our steps
along each line, vi^ithout finding a flaw in any link of the
chain ; but placing one proposition against the other, both
representing facts, we can see no possibility of subordinating
one to the other or of including both in some higher synthesis.
If the adoption of imperfection was necessary for the attain-
ment of greater perfection, then God was not originally per-
fect. If the adoption of imperfection was not necessary, then
why does imperfection exist ? . . . . And so at length we arrive
at a blank outlook, and realise that, with our present limited,
imperfect knowledge, intellectual consideration will carry us
no farther.

Tennyson declines to be content with this impossible con-
clusion. He clearly recognises this knowledge, and the limita-
tion of human intelligence. Yet he will not adopt the ready
expedient of shutting his eyes to either set of facts. To take
refuge in a a blank atheism would be to neglect the one chain
of reasoning. To refuse to acknowledge the evil of the world,
and assert a blind optimism, would be to neglect the other.
To suspend judgment, and refuse to commit oneself to either
alternative, is impossible in a world where action is impera-
tive : every word and deed, every conscious choice of daily

ROBERT BV CHAN AN. 6i

life must depend implicitly, if not explicitly, on the decision
which is accepted. We are compelled, by the conditions of
our existence in a world of change, to act as if we had solved
the problem ; and the theoretical oscillation, which might be
possible in a world of thought, becomes intolerable in a world
of free choice between conflicting claims.

And here, Tennyson asserts, is the true sphere for the
operation of faith. Faith furnishes the impulse and pre-
dominant motive demanded for action by the bold assertion
that, in some manner unknown to us., these contradictory propo-
sitions are reconcilable. It emphasises our refusal to shut our
eyes to either facts of experience ; but it trusts that in some
higher unity, the nature of which we cannot even conceive,
these two contrary propositions may be harmonised. To
every man, to the determined Pyrrhonist or most convinced
Sceptic, some measure of faith is necessary for the transition
from his metaphysic to his practical philosophy. Recognise
that evil possesses real existence, and we can assail it, and
battle with it, and pass our lives in conflict with it ; but for
support in this combat, and for motive in the long day's
struggle, we must also maintain faith in the reality of good-
ness, and the unity of the world, and the ultimate triumph
of righteousness. And although., intellectually, we may have no
glimmerings of a possible harmony ; yet if we are faithful to our
belief we may find other reasons for adhering to it. Doubts will
still trouble us, but deep in the human heart there will arise a
conviction which no logical argument can destroy, a confident
apprehension that ' all is well.' *

Well might Buchanan proclaim the hopeless illo-
gicality of all who ' seek to trim and tinker the be-
wildering popular religion. 't We are, says Tennyson

* ' Tennyson as a Religious Teacher.' {T^e italics are mine.)
f Prose note to 'The Ballad of Mary the Mother.'

62 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

— and apparently Mr. Masterman echoes the state-
ment— to evade the sense of personal insignificance
provoked by the vastness of the Universe by declaring
that part of the phenomena which so affright us is only
phenomenal, while admitting the objective reality of
the rest. And further, we are to reconcile the eternal
paradox of the cruelty or indifference of Nature by
taking for granted a * possible harmony ' of which, it is
confessed, we have not even ' a glimmering ! ' I have
read somewhere of one of the old quacksalvers and pro-
jectors of the Middle Ages that he made it a sine qua
non with all pupils who committed themselves to his
tuition that, for three years, they should study no
system but his, and permit no doubt of his teaching to
find room in their minds. A royal road to belief
indeed, but not one which is likely to commend itself
to a generation fed by the thought of Spencer and
Huxley. Such a philosophy is impossible of acceptance
by the thinking minority who have made up their
minds lo know^ even if the whole sum of knowledge
they can arrive at is that they can know nothing. One
turns from such a feast of husks, such ' vacant chaff
well meant for grain,' to the dish-and-all-swallowing
* faith ' of Bishop Blougram with a sense of positive
relief: —

I hear you recommend, I might at least

Eliminate, decrassify my faith

Since I adopt it, keeping what I must

And leaving what I can — such points as this.

I won't — that is, I can't throw one away.

Supposing there's no truth in what I hold

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 63

About the need of trial to men's faith,
Still, when you bid me purify the same
To such a process I discern no end.
Clearing ofF one excrescence to see two,
There's ever a next in size, now grown as big
That meets the knife : I cut and cut again !
First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last
But Fichte's clever cut at God himself?
Experimentalize on sacred things !
I trust nor hand, nor eye, nor heart, nor brain,
To stop betimes \ they all get drunk alike.
The first step, I am master not to take.

Here, at least, something like an intellectual
foothold is possible. We may call the man who clings
to such a position a moral and intellectual ' skulker,'
but all the logical cannonading in the world will not
dislodge one stone of his fortress. He is neither above
nor below logical argument — he is out of its range
altogether. Tennyson was nearer, in his theological
standpoint, to Bishop Blougram than to the leaders of
scientific thought. Mr. Masterman, with a healthy
■scorn for the mere * case-making ' advocacy which will
have the object of its adulation right on all points,
owns as much : —

It was the safe rather than the heroic course that Tenny-
son exalted in the world of thought and of action. In his own
speculation he never launched out on the turmoil of modern
doubt. He was always crushing his doubts, refusing to let them
shake his belief in the older ideal. . . . And the consequence of
all this is, that for the more adventurous minds, Tennyson, as
a teacher, can never give that full satisfaction which they can
derive from those who have journeyed freely, and gone forward

64 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

wherever they may be led. He is too much prepared to
judge success and failure by the mere worldly standard ; he
cannot see that * earth's failure ' may be necessary for ' heaven's
success,' and that it is better to have failed in a great cause
than to have contentedly acquiesced in a lower ideal. It is
well to remember the lesson insisted on by a great contem-
porary writer, ' While in all things that we see or do we are ta
desire perfection, and to strife for it, we are, nevertheless, not
to set the narrow thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above
the noble thing, in its mighty progress ; not to esteem smooth
minuteness above shattered majesty ; not to prefer mean
victory to honourable defeat, not to lower the level of our aims
that we may surely enjoy the complacency of success.'

This intellectual timidity runs all through Tenny-
son's work, bounding his outlook, shortening his hands,
cramping the effort of which, had it been backed by an
extra grain of mental courage, such a genius as his
might have been capable. Let us once more listen ta
Mr. Masterman : —

* Trim hedges, smooth lawns, butterflies, posies, and
nightingales ' — a quiet English scenery — is the scenery loved
by Tennyson. This is peopled by contented peasants, who
bow deferentially to their superiors, a society organized in a
hierarchy culminating in the great house. Here dwell a select
and cultured few, who discuss mild philosophy, profess a
languid enthusiasm for slowly broadening freedom, and, in
moments of leisure, thank God for the existence of the narrow
seas that protect them from * the mad fool-fury of the Seine.'
Such was Tennyson's ideal of the perfect life. And it was
because he lived to see the gradual destruction of this order, and
seemed powerless to restrain the incoming tide, that in his
latter years his voice so often rose in a melancholy cry of
despair. His ideal was benevolence descending, halo-crowned.

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 65

received with enthusiastic gratitude by those below. ' Why,'

he asked, as if suddenly discovering some marvellous act of

kindness,

Why should not these great Sirs

Give up their parks some dozen times a year.

To let the people breathe ?

He lived, alas ! to see ' the people ' claiming as their own
right that which was to be granted as a gracious favour ; the
hedges broken down, the motley crowd flooding in on to the
pleasant preserves ; strange shapes, socialists, democrats,
anarchists, each preaching some new creed, which was to
create the new heaven and the new earth ; the downfall of
the older ideal ; the stormful birth of the new era. Small
wonder, if he turned away in disgust from —

This earth a stage so gloomed with woe,
You all but sicken at the shifting scenes.

Small wonder indeed that a man of such a tempera-
ment should so turn away, but something surely of a
pity that the most divinely beautiful of all English
singers should have found no message for the down-
trodden helots of an effete hierarchy other than that
conveyed in the old familiar jingle : —

Always know your proper stations.

Live upon your daily rations,

And bless the Squire and his relations.

This is obviously not the place in which to
attempt a complete appreciation of the work of the
two great poets with whose theological tendencies
I have thus briefly dealt, and I must rely upon
the candour of my readers to understand that the
gift of imagination and the power of expression

r

66 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

which were the especial glories both of Browning
and Tennyson have no warmer living admirer than
myself. Nor, when I claim for Buchanan — as I shall
presently attempt to prove — that, in his views and
treatment of theological questions, he came nearer
than they to expressing the trend of his generation,
do I make any claim for him of genius generally
superior to theirs. He would himself have been
the first to repudiate any such claim. The frank and
cordial admiration he extended to both his great
rivals was repeatedly expressed. He held Tennyson
facile princeps as a verbal artist, and he laboured hard
for many years among the little band of critics whose
generous praise did so much to atone to Browning
for journalistic insult and public neglect. In offering
my appraisement of him for what it may be worth, I
enjoy a complete sense of critical liberty, inasmuch
as I know that, could it reach his knowledge, he would
ask no more than I have to give ; that he would neither
desire nor accept a critical verdict which would place
him one inch higher than he has a right to be at
the expense of contemporaries whose splendid gifts
he was himself ever the first to recognise and acclaim.
That he might, had he so chosen, have stood beside
the greatest merely as a poetic stylist, is my express
conviction. The boy who, in the early twenties,
could write verse of the quality of that Buchanan
wrote in the ' Undertones ' had nothing to fear, as
a writer of verse, even from the impeccable Tennyson.
But, in his later years, he was content to forego what>

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 67

unfortunately, he had come to consider a prize not
worth the grasping. He had educated himself into
a contempt of verbal chic or prettiness — an unwise
contempt, since even mere chic is distinctly worth
having — and had a fierce impatience of mere perfection
of verbal form, not giving it the importance it
fairly possesses even when its beauty is merely the
fitting garniture of noble thought. ' Two-thirds of
our native poetic growth from Euphues downwards
is mere verbiage,' he wrote, ' and of late years verbiage
has blossomed with the amazing splendour of a sun-
flower,' The theory which guided him throughout
the latter years of his career was, as he himself
expressed it, ' the theory that the end and crown
of Art is simplicity, and that words, when they only
conceal thought, are the veriest weeds, to be cut
remorselessly away.' But it cannot be said for him
that, in avoiding mere floweriness, he always succeeded
in avoiding verbiage, and the careless rapidity with
which he wrote but too often made his style unworthy
of his matter. It was a favourite saying of his that,
if the thought was clear, the vocabulary to clothe it
came of itself, which, though true enough to an
extent, is only a half-truth. Thought is common
to all intelligent people, and most ideas may fairly
be said to be common property. Solomon nor
Shakespeare had no keener — perhaps no deeper —
sense of the mystery of life than many a thoughtful
peasant, but the peasant can only at some passing
moment of high emotion find the phrase which

68 ROBERT BV CHAN AN.

illumines the depth of his own heart. I remember,
years ago, hearing the news broken to a working
miner that the home he had left safe and happy
only an hour or two before had been swallowed in
a landslip determined by the sinking of the ground
above the gallery of a worked-out mine. His
mother, his wife, and his two children had perished.
Except that the man's face went ashen grey in
colour, he showed little sign of emotion, but after
a minute of dumb immobility he passed his hand
across his eyes like a man struggling against an
overpowering dizziness, and said, ' I shall wake
by-and-by.' The sentiment conveyed by the words
is identical with that tremendous line of the Eliza-
bethan poet, put into the mouth of Titus Andronicus,
who, like the illiterate miner, was staggered by a
catastrophe too great for instant comprehension : —

When will this fearful slumber have an end ?

A poet might write any number of such verses quite

coolly, moved only by the mere artistic thrill of

pleasure in his creation of a strong and living line.

The rude phrase of the miner was probably the one

striking utterance of his life. A local poet of the

same district — the South Staffordshire Black Country

— ran Burns neck-and-neck so far as the sentiment

of his verse was concerned, in such doggerel as the

following : —

The sun that shines so bright above
Knows nought about my wrongful love :

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 69

The birds that sing in Wigmore Lane

Bring nothing to my heart but pain :

It is a very dismal thing

That in my ears the birds should sing

While my Selina has gone ofF

To walk with Mr. Abraham Gough.

Where is the difference, save in that all-essential
quality of style, between this and Burns's anguished

' ' Ye'll break my heart, ye little birds

That wanton on yon flowery thorn —
Ye mind me of departed joys —
Departed never to return !

The only meed we can yield the pitman-poet is a
smile. The phrase of Burns, which is, verbally, almost
as simple, wrings the heart-strings; yet both express
an identical feeling — the sense of angry revolt at the
indifference of external Nature to our personal woe.

It may be said, as a broad and easy generalisation,
that the lover of mere beauty will prefer the
earlier poems of Buchanan ; the lover of thought, his
later work. It was but seldom, after forty, that the
rush and turmoil of the ideas he felt it his mission
to express left him the time or the desire to linger
over his work, to polish it to the highest attainable
pitch of brightness. Let it be remembered that it
was a lad of twenty-two who wrote the following
passage from ' Pan,' in ' Undertones,' and the claim
for Buchanan, that, had he been content to cultivate
beauty of expression as the greatest poetical good, he
might have stood shoulder to shoulder with the

70 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

greatest of English verbal artists will hardly be

seriously questioned.

In Arcady

1, sick of mine own envy, hollow'd out

A valley, green and deep, then, pouring forth

From the great hollow of my hand a stream

Sweeter than honey, bade it wander on

In soft and rippling lapse to the far sea.

Upon its banks grew flowers as thick as grass.

Gum-dropping poplars and the purple vine.

Slim willows dusty like the thighs of bees.

And further, stalks of corn and wheat and flax.

And even further, on the mountain sides

White sheep and new yean'd lambs, and in the midst

Mild-featured shepherds piping. Was not this

An image of your grander ease, O gods ?

A sweet, faint picture of your bliss, O gods ?

They thanked me, those sweet shepherds, with the smoke

Of crimson sacrifice of lambkins slain,

Rich spices, succulent herbs that savour meats;

And when they came upon me ere aware,

Walk'd sudden on my presence where I piped

By rivers low my mournful ditties old.

Cried ' Pan ! ' and worshipp'd. Yet it was not well,

Ye gods, it was not well, that I, who gave

The harvest to these men, and, with my breath

Thickened the wool upon the backs of sheep,

I, Pan, should in those purblind mortal forms

Witness a loveliness more gently fair.

Nearer to your dim loveliness, O gods !

Than my immortal wood-pervading self —

Carelessly blown on by the rosy Hours,

Who breathe quick breath and smile before they die —

Goat-footed, horn'd, a monster — yet a god.

For modern music more perfect than this we must

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 71

go to Keats, to Shelley, or to the mature work of
Tennyson. More than one other of the poems in the
same collection has this magic of melody. Listen to
the varied, changing syllabic beat of ' Selene the Moon.'

I hide myself in the cloud that flies

From the west and drops on the hill's grey shoulder,
And I gleam through the cloud with my panther eyes,

While the stars turn pale, the dews grow colder ;
I veil my naked glory in mist,

Quivering downward and dewily glistening,
Till his sleep is as pale as my lips unkist.

And I tremble above him, panting and listening.
As white as a star, as cold as a stone,

Dim as my light in a sleeping lake.
With his head on his arm he lieth alone,

And I sigh * Awake !
Wake, Endymion, wake and see ! '
And he stirs in his sleep for the love of me ;

But on his eyelids my breath I shake :
' Endymion, Endymion !
Awaken, awaken ! '
And the yellow grass stirs with a mystic moan.

And the tall pines groan,
And Echo sighs in her grot forsaken

The name of Endymion !

*****

Ai ! The black earth brightens, the sea creeps near,

When I swim from the sunset's shadowy portal 5
But he will not see, and he will not hear,

Though to hear and to see were to be immortal :
Pale as a star and cold as a stone.

Dim as my ghost in a sleeping lake.
In an icy vision he lieth alone,

And I sigh, ' Awake !

72 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Wake, Endymion, wake and be

Divine, divine, for the love of me ! '
And my odorous breath on his lids I shake :

' Endymion, Endymion !
Awaken, awaken ! '
But Jove sitteth cold on his cloud-shrouded throne

And heareth my moan,
And his stern lips form not the hope-forsaken

Name of Endymion.

I do not wish to overload my pages with quotation^
but a certain latitude in this matter is allowable, and
indeed necessary; and I must ask the liberty to allow
Buchanan to speak for himself in justification of certain
claims I make for him in cases where his own personal
utterance alone can carry conviction of the justice of
the claim. His later work, dealing always honestly,
and sometimes fiercely, with vital questions of conduct
and outlook regarding which every thinking man must
needs work out his own belief, naturally attracted an
amount of notice which has tended to throw into the
shade of forgetfulness the earlier achievements upon
which, as an artist, his fame will ultimately rest.
Critical duty would be only partially fulfilled were
not the attention of the reader redirected to work of
lofty artistic quality, which in the polemical excitement
occasioned by such utterances as ' The Wandering Jew,'
and ' Mary the Mother,' has been, if only temporarily
and partially, forgotten or ignored. Finally forgotten
or neglected it could not be; its artistic quality will
ensure it a place in the anthology of English poetry,
and there is more than a mere off-chance in the

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 73

possibility of its finally eclipsing in the popular affection
the later work in which its author had the greater
faith as a passport to the consideration of posterity.
Beauty in a work of art must always be a paramount
quality, and, when once recognised, is in small danger
of ever being forgotten. I shall permit myself one
final and perhaps rather lengthy quotation fi-om the
' Undertones,' in which Buchanan touched the high-
water- mark of his poetical achievement, a poem worthy
of the supreme beauty and divine significance of the
affections to which it owed its creation. ' Undertones *
were preceded by a Prologue, addressed to ' David
in Heaven,' and closed by an Epilogue dedicated to
'Mary on Earth.' 'David* was David Gray, the
poet of the Luggie, the splendidly gifted and un-
fortunate young writer to whom Buchanan was united
by the bonds of an affection which may be soberly
described as passionate. His early death was, to the
surviving fi-iend, as bitter a blow as the loss of Arthur
Henry Hallam was to Tennyson. And, as Hallam's
death inspired one of the most exquisite poems in the
literature of the entire world, so the death of David
Gray moved Buchanan to utterances of sorrow which,
to my ear and heart at least, are scarcely less beautiful.
' Mary ' was Mary Jay, Buchanan's dearly loved wife,
whose loss, some sixteen years ago, caused him a
sorrow even more poignant than that which dwelt about
the memory of his boyish friend. She was living at the
date of the poem which bears her name, and for some
years thereafter, and in that poem Buchanan brought

74 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

into sweet accord the two loftiest and most abiding in-
fluences of his life, his yearning for his dead friend, his
affection for his living bride. I quote the poem in its
entirety, feeling it too sacred for mutilation, and feeling
also that it alone will suffice to justify the claim I make
— that its author stands of right among the great poets
of England.

I.
So, now the task is ended ; and to-night,
Sick, impotent, no longer soul-sustain'd.
Withdrawing eyes from that ideal height
Where, in low undertones, those spirits plain'd,
Each full of special glory unattain'd —
I turn on you, Sweet-Heart, my weary sight. —
Shut out the darkness, shutting in the light :
So ! now the task is ended. What is gain'd ?

First, sit beside me. Place your hand in mine.

From deepest fountains of your veins the while

Call up your Soul; and briefly let it shine

In those grey eyes with mildness feminine.

Yes, smile, Dear ! — you are truest when you smile.

My heart to-night is calm as peaceful dreams. —
Afar away the wind is shrill, the culver
Blows up and down the moor with windy gleams,
The birch unlooseneth her locks of silver
And shakes them softly on the mountain streams.
And o'er the grave that holds my David's dust
The Moon uplifts her empty, dripping horn :
Thither my fancies turn, but turn in trust,
Not wholly sadly, faithful though forlorn.

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 75

For you, too, love him, mourn his life's quick fleeting ;

We think of him in common. Is it so ? —

Your little hand has answer'd, and I know

His name makes music in your heart's soft beating ;

And — well, 'tis something gain'd for him and me —

Him, in his heaven, and me, in this low spot,

Something his eyes will see, and joy to see —

That you, too, love him, though you knew him not.

4-

Yet this is bitter. We were boy and boy.

Hand link'd in hand we dreamt of power and fame,

We shared each other's sorrow, pride, and joy.

To one wild tune our swift blood went and came.

Eyes drank each other's hope with flash of flame.

Then, side by side, we clomb the hill of life,

We ranged thro' mist and mist, thro' storm and strife ;

But then, — it is so bitter, now, to feel

That his pale Soul to mine was so akin.

Firm fix'd on goals we each set forth to win.

So twinly conscious of the sweet Ideal,

So wedded (God forgive me if I sin !)

That neither he, my friend, nor I, could steal

One glimpse of heaven's divinities — alone,

And flushing, seek his brother, and reveal

Some hope, some joy, some beauty, else unknown ;

Nor, bringing down his sunlight from the Sun,

Call sudden up, to light his fellow's face,

A smile as proud, as glad, as that I trace

In your dear eyes, now, when my work is done.

5.

Love gains in giving. What had I to give
Whereof his Poet-Soul was not possest ?
What gleams of stars he knew not, fugitive
As lightning-flashes, could I manifest ?

76 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

What music, fainting from a clearer air ?

What light of sunrise from beyond the grave ?

What pride in knowledge that he could not share ?-

Ay, Mary, it is bitter ; for I swear

He took with him, to heav'n, no wealth I gave.

No, Love, it is not bitter ! Thoughts like these

Were sin the songs I sing you must adjust.

Not bitter, ah ! not bitter ! — God is just ;

And, seeing our one-knowledge, just God chose

By one swift stroke, to part us. Far above

The measure of my hope, my pain, my love,

Above our seasons, suns and rains and snows, —

He, like an exhalation, thus arose ;

Hearing in a diviner atmosphere

Music we only see, when, dewy and dim,

The stars through gulfs of azure darkness swim,

Music we seem to see, but cannot hear.

But evermore my Poet, on his height,

Fills up my Soul with sweetness to the brim,

Rains influence, and warning, and delight ;

And now, I smile for pride and joy in him !

7-

I said, Love gains by giving. And to know
That I, who could not glorify my Friend,
Soul of my Soul, although I loved him so.
Have power and strength and privilege to lend
Glimpses of heav'n to Thee, of hope, of bliss !
Power to go heavenward, pluck flowers and blend
Their hues in wreaths I give thee with a kiss —
You, Love, who climb not up the heights at all !
To think, to think, I never could upcall
On his dead face, so proud a smile as this !

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 77

8.

Most just is God, who bids me not be sad
For his dear sake whose name is dear to thee.
Who bids me proudly climb and sometimes see
With joy a glimpse of him in glory clad ;
Who, further, bids your life be proud and glad,
When I have climb'd and seen, for joy in me.
My lowly-minded, gentle-hearted Love !
I bring you down his gifts, and am sustain'd :
You watch and pray, I climb — he stands above.
So, now the task is ended, what is gain'd.

9-

This knowledge. — Better in your arms to rest.
Better to love you till my heart should break.
Than pause to ask if he who would be blest
Should love for more than his own loving's sake.
So closer, closer still ; for (while afar.
Mile upon mile toward the Polar star.
Now in the autumn time our Poet's dust
Sucks back thro^ grassy sods the flowers it thrust
To feel the summer on the outer earth)
I turn to you, and on your bosom fall.
Love gains by giving. I have given my all.
So, smile — to show you hold the gift of worth.

10.

Ay, all the thanks that I on earth can render

To him who sends me such good news from God,

Is, in due turn, to thy young life to tender

Hopes that denote, while blossoming in splendour

Where an invisible Angel's foot hath trod.

So, sweetheart, I have given unto thee.

Not only such poor song as here I twine.

But Hope, Ambition, all of mine or me.

My flesh and blood, and more, my Soul divine.

78 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Take all, take all ! Ay, wind white arms about
My neck and from my breath draw bliss for thine :
Smile, Sweet-Heart, and be happy — lest thou doubt
How much the gift I give thee makes thee mine !

It is undeniable that during the latter years of
his life Buchanan failed not merely to improve in
verbal technique, but even to hold anything like the
high level of excellence which he had formerly attained
and held so easily. There are several explanations
of this merely artistic decadence. He had passed
the earlier years of his life in bitter struggle in London,
and, after that period of enforced poverty, had chosen
to spend a further time in the wilder portions of
Scotland and Ireland, living a life of the completest
simplicity. Had he continued that existence his work
would, in all probability, have been very much smaller
in bulk, and proportionately finer in texture. But he
heard the great world calling ; he sickened of the
loneliness of the mountain and the moor, feeling, as he
himself has told us, that, ' after ten years of solitude he
should have gone mad if he had not rushed back into
the thick of life.' Weary of solitary dreaming, he
found an almost fierce delight in 'superabundant activity.*
Fame had come to him, and with fame came too a large
increase in the wages of his work. Every magazine and
review in London was open to him, the theatre held
out golden lures. His facility of execution was some-
thing astounding — almost disquieting. I have known
him produce a one-volume novel of the length of fifty
thousand words in twelve days, and a three-act comedy.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 79

which ran for over a year in London, was invented and
written in less than a week. All the vast mass of
thought, scholarship and experience which he had
accumulated during the first tranquil twenty years of
his active intellectual life was seething and fermenting
in his brain ; length of practice as a writer had given
him enormous facility of expression; the costly life
of London demanded far more money than had
sufficed for the simpler existence of Skye and Conne-
mara; and by a natural and inevitable consequence, his
literary output grew in extent and — but too frequently
— declined in quality. His professedly poetical work
alone makes something like the bulk of Browning's,
and many times the bulk of Tennyson's. Add to that
the writing (and personal production) of over fifty
plays; the writing of more than thirty novels and of
a camel-load of critical, polemical, and sociological
' etceteras ' in the forms of pamphlet, review, and
* Letters to the Editor' of the 'T'elegraph, the Chronic le,
the Star, the Sunday Special, and other metropolitan
journals; and a huge mass of unpublished and un-
finished work in prose and rhyme, and it will be seen
that the forty years of intellectual activity allotted to
Buchanan were fairly well filled; and that it is little
wonder that he fell out of the running, merely as an
artist, with crafiismen whose leisurely habits of pro-
duction allowed them to ' smoke seven pipes ' over the
polishing of a single phrase. An incurable contempt
of money, joined to the tenderest heart in the world,
helped not a little towards this consummation. Robert

So ROBERT BVCHJNAN.

Buchanan could hear of no case of poverty or suffering
and rest until he had relieved it, and for many years
he was the milch-cow of every impecunious scribbler in
London. His nationality must have cost him many
scores of pounds per annum, because, at all times open
to the moving influence of a tale of woe, he would
always reward with a double gratuity any such tale that
was told with a Scotch accent. The actor who had
fallen on evil times dined sumptuously on the day he
met Buchanan. Often laughing at himself for being
the dupe of people he knew to be morally unworthy,
he never knotted his purse-strings for such a reason.
It was enough that the applicant was poor. He had
little faith in ' organized ' charity, and detested the self-
advertisement of the published subscription list. He
felt that charity was hardly charity at all unless the alms
could pass from hand to hand, accompanied by a word
of hopeful cheer which doubled the value of the gift
The days of his own early struggles remained with him
a living memory, and kept his heart soft for all the
stepsons of Dame Fortune : —

Et ego in Bohemia fui !

Have known its fountains deep and dewy,

Have wandered where the sun shone mellow

On many an honest, ragged fellow,

And for Bohemia's sake since then

Have loved poor brothers of the pen.

I've popt at vultures circling skyward,

I've made the carrion-hawks a bye-word,

But never caused a sigh or sob in

The breast of mavis or cock-robin,

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 8i

Nay, many such (let Time attest me ! )
Have fed out of my hand, and blest me !
So when my wayward life is ended,
With all my sins that can't be mended,
And in my singing rags I lie
Face upward to the cruel sky,
The small birds, fluttering about me,
While birds of prey and ravens flout me,
May strew a few loose leaves above
The Outcast whom so few could love, —
And on my grave in flower-wrought words

The Inscription set that man may view it —
' He blest the nameless singing birds.
Loved the good Shepherd's flock and herds,

Et ille in Bohemia fuit ! '

The position I claim for Buchanan in the Victorian
period of English literature, is, then, briefly this —
that his failure to attain the highest rank as an
executive artist was greatly determined by the power
of circumstance and in part by his own deliberate
choice. I pass now to the second half of my claim,
which is, that as an exponent of the deeper in-
tellectual life of his epoch as evidenced in its religious
evolution he was truer, more complete, and there-
fore, in so far greater, than his two great and friendly
rivals, Browning and Tennyson, whose credentials
to be accepted as the typical vocalisers of modern
religious thought I have already ventured to examine.
To sum up as briefly as may be their positions
in this matter, I think it may fairly be said that
Browning failed by ambiguity of expression, an
ambiguity so marked that, to his own ' amazement

G

82 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and concern,' * he found himself acclaimed as the
public champion of a Church whose membership, in
private, he unmistakably repudiated. Tennyson failed,
as the most scholarly and one of the most admiring of
his critics has found himself forced to confess, because
he had not that full measure of moral and intellectual
audacity firmly to face, and pitilessly to dissect, the
doubts he could but feel. It now remains for us to
consider the treatment accorded to identical problems
by the third great English poet who, in the latter half
of the nineteenth century, made it his business to deal
with them.

As we have seen, in common with almost every
other poet who has ever written, Buchanan began his
career as a seer and delineator of beauty. The lovely
myths of Greece had appealed to him as they did to
Keats, and his young imagination had chosen for the
site of its first wanderings the hills and forests of
Hellas, Then, as will be made clear by a chronological
study of his work, such themes ceased to content him,
the actualities of life drew him from the contemplation
of the beautifiil shadows of the olden poesy ; and Willie
Baird and Poet Andrew, the Widow Mysie, the Little
Milliner, Liz the Coster-girl, Edward Crowhurst the
rustic poet, usurped the place upon the poetic easel
hitherto occupied by Selene and Polyphemus, Pygmalion
and Pan. The strident roll of the city street, the sweet
sounds of British and Irish rustic life, entered into the

* ' The Outcast.' Epistle Dedicatory.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 85

music of his verse, and the verse grows sadder, as it needs
must do when a poet turns from the moonlit, opalescent
wraiths of an extinct dreamland to the practicalities of
life. The note of sadness deepens from volume to
volume, though it is still relieved by such bits of
innocent gaiety as ' Clari in the Well,' and of rollicking
Irish devilry as ' The Wake of Tim O'Hara,' until, in
the year 1870, being then in his twenty-eighth year,
Buchanan struck the keynote of his future main life-
work in ' Coruisken Sonnets.' It was during his
wanderings amid the stern grandeurs of the Isle of Skye
that the problems on whose discussion he first entered in
that little volume took a firm grip of him and assumed
the disquieting proportions they never afterwards lost.
Small as the volume is, it is important to the student
of Buchanan's theological evolution, and by no means
unimportant in the poetical history of the last century.
I know of nothing quite like these Sonnets, of no utter-
ance which is, in some ways, more strange and
interesting, more expressive of the spiritual unrest
which is the tormenting inheritance of every thinking
man born in our times. As in Browning, as in Tenny-
son, as in every powerful personality in any marked
degree in touch with the conflicting hopes and doubts
of the century, there was in Buchanan ' a dual per-
sonality ; ' that of the poet, the eternal child, who would
so gladly be content with what he himself has called
* the fairy tales of God,' happy in the dim light and
incense-laden air of the Temple of Faith, did not his
adult alter ego clamour for satisfaction of the reason, for

84 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

iron-bound logic, for precise rectangular demonstration
The second of these personalities had hitherto been
asleep, stirring faintly at moments when a shadow had
fallen on his closed eyelids. It was obvious that the
young lad who had joined gaily in the cheap revels of
the literary Bohemia, and had shared the jokes and
junkets of ' inky-boys and bouncing lasses ; ' who had
recreated his fancy by translating into song the crystalline
babble of the mountain brook ; had toyed with Grecian
legend and depicted old Horatius Flaccus chirping
over his Falernian on the Digentia ; had hitherto found
life too good and sweet, too satisfactorily explanatory
of its own excellence, to grizzle over the problem of its
ultimate outcome and meaning. But, in the weird
solitudes dominated by the shadow of Mount Blaabhein
the doubting half of him awoke to life : —

Late in the gloaming of the year
I haunt the melancholy mere ;
A Phantom I, where Phantoms brood
In this soul-searching soHtude.
Hiding my forehead in the dim
Hem of His robe, I question Him.

It is worthy of notice that this ' questioning ' of
God was not, as in the case of Tennyson, the result of
a sudden shock to any individual human affection.
The loss of David Gray had wounded Buchanan's heart
much as the loss of Arthur Hallam had lacerated
Tennyson's, but so far from having suggested to him
doubt of the goodness, or of the very existence, of the
Divine Fatherhood, it had actually strengthened beHef

ROBERT BV CHAN AN. 85

and acquiescence. It was God's 'justice,' not his
cruelty, which had inspired the stroke that parted the
two friends. The dead friend lived still in the
* influence and warning and delight ' he rained upon the
living, and, in his loneliness the survivor could still
' smile with joy and pride ' in the friend who was as a
veritable ambassador of his love to the throne of God.
It was before the impassivity of external nature, the
eternal silence of the hills, the Inarticulate moan of the
tormented waters, beneath the chill immensity and
aloofness of the inaccessible sky, that he felt suddenly

Cold are all these as snow, and still as stone.

Not in the anguish of sudden personal loss, but in
the contrast between the stony calm of the huge cosmos
reflected in a waste solitude, the question rose ' Does
God exist at all ? ' For —

I found Thee not by the starved widow's bed,

Nor in the sick rooms where my dear ones died ;
In cities vast I hearken'd for Thy tread,

And heard a thousand call Thee, wretched-eyed.
Worn out, and bitter. But the Heavens denied

Their melancholy Maker. From the dead
Assurance came, nor answer ! Then I fled

Into these wastes, and raised my hands, and cried :
* The seasons pass — the sky is as a pall —

Thin wasted hands on withering hearts we press —
There is no God, in vain we plead and call,

In vain with weary eyes we search and guess —
Like children in an empty house sit all,

Cast-away children, lorn and fatherless.'

There the question is posed and answered by a bitter

86 ROBERT BUCHJNAN.

negative. This particular sonnet is peculiarly inter-
esting for the double reason that while it is almost
the first utterance of Buchanan's dealing with the
problem of Godhead, it is also the last and only
one I have been able to find in his work in which
the existence of a Diety is flatly denied by the poet
in his own person. An ' Atheist ' in the true meaning
of the word, Buchanan never was, and that he should
have written this sonnet, even in his blackest mood so
early in his career, is all but incredible. He knew
many fluctuations of feeling and belief regarding
the being of a personal God, and expressed most of
them ; and it is just because of that, because he found
the courage not merely to face and dwell upon the
problem — a courage common enough — and also because
he possessed the rarer courage to feel no shame in
professing and proclaiming every phase of his in-
certitude, that he seems to me so pre-eminently the
poet of his day. He was profoundly in sympathy
with the dictum of Goethe that ' Religion stands in
the same relation to Art as any other of the higher
interests of life.' Accepting that dictum, he asked,
* Where is the great poem, where the noble music built
on that wondrous theme ? . . . . The reticence of false
culture steals over the life of many who might instruct
us deeply by their experience. . . . There is a great
emotional and spiritual life yet unrepresented, there are
rude forces not yet brought into play, but all of which
must sooner or later have their place in art.' He
practised himself the spiritual and intellectual freedom

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 87

whose necessity he proclaimed, he marked every
halting-place on the line of his own theological
evolution by a volume or a song : he travelled far
and wide, but never at any later period of his life
did he arrive at the goal of Atheism, which yet, upon
the testimony of this one sonnet, might be taken for
his starting point, ' Without the sanction of the Super-
natural, the certainty of the Superhuman, Life to me is
nothing,' he wrote in the Epistle Dedicatory to ^ The
Outcast,' and I remember him saying one day that

* God and his own soul ' were the only entities in the
universe of which he felt any abiding certainty. But,
to a mind with any strong tinge of what may perhaps
be called ' intellectual practicality,' the * God ' of
Buchanan seems at best but a misty, uncertain, and
rather useless personality. He is certainly not the
God over whose dethronement the poet mourned in
the opening passages of ' The Outcast,' or defined, if

* definition ' is not too precise a name for so shadowy
a performance, in the Proem to ' The Book of Orm,'
in lines of singular beauty : —

When in these songs I name the Name of God,

I mean not Him who ruled with brazen rod

The rulers of the Jew ; nor Him who calm

Sat reigning on Olympus ; nay, nor Brahm,

Osiris, Allah, Odin, Balder, Thor,

(Though these I honour with a hundred more) ;

Menu I mean not, nor the Man Divine,

The Pallid Rainbow lighting Palestine j

Nor any lesser of the gods which Man

Hath conjured out of Night since Time began.

88 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

I mean the primal Mystery and Light,

The most Unfathomable, Infinite,

The Higher Law, Impersonal, Supreme,

The Life in Life, the Dream within the Dream,

The Fountain which in silent melody

Feeds the dumb waters of Eternity,

The source whence every god hath flown and flows,

And whither each departs to find repose.

Nebulous enough ! but nebulosity is the natural and
inevitable result of any endeavour to define the in-
definable. There was, to a positive mind, Uttle enough
to cling to even in such a Deity as this, but faint and
far away as are the personality and the locale here
described, both grew fainter yet in the poet's later
years. In his last published volume, ' The New
Rome,* he declares God to be ' in process of becoming,'
and a rather slow and laborious process it would appear

to be : —

Turn from that mirage of a God on high

Holding the sceptre of a creed outworn,
And hearken to the faint half-human cry

Of Nature quickening with the God unborn !

The God unborn, the God that is to be.

The God that has not been since Time began, —

Hark, — that low sound of Nature's agony
Echoed thro' life and the hard heart of Man !

Fed with the blood and tears of living things,

Nourished and strengthened by Creation's woes^

The God unborn, that shall be King of Kings,
Sown in the darkness, thro' the darkness grows.

Alas, the long slow travail and the pain

Of her who bears Him in her mighty womb !

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 89

How long ere He shall live and breathe and reign.
While yonder Phantom fades to give Him room ?

Where'er great pity is and piteousness.

Where'er great Love and Love's strange sorrow stay,.
Where'er men cease to curse, but bend to bless

Frail brethren fashioned like themselves of clay ;

Where'er the lamb and lion side by side
Lie down in peace, where'er on land or sea

Infinite Love and Mercy heavenly eyed
Emerge, there stirs the God that is to be !

His light is round the slaughtered bird and beast
As round the forehead of Man crucified, —

All things that live, the greatest and the least.
Await the coming of this Lord and Guide ;

And every gentle deed by mortals done,

Yea, every holy thought and loving breath.

Lighten poor Nature's travail with this Son

Who shall be Lord and God of Life and Death !

No God behind us in the empty Vast,

No God enthroned on yonder heights above,

But God emerging, and evolved at last
Out of the inmost heart of human Love !

One can only say, in this connexion, that theological
terminology is at its best so misty and uncertain, that
the attempt to pin any believer in any form of Godhead
down to a scientific definition of the object of venera-
tion, is to ask the impossible : and for the believer to
make the attempt unasked is to attempt the impossible.
Browning, wiser in his generation, was content to aver
that he was ' very sure of God,' but he nowhere, in his
proper person, gave any definition or description of the

90 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

God of Whom he was so certain. God, as already
said, has seemed hitherto an absolute necessity to the
poetic intelligence. It is a word, more infinitely full of
vague suggestion than ' Mesopotamia,' and the poet
finds a mysterious comfort in repeating it, and in
clinging to some shadowy and nameless outside force
for which it serves as a sort of algebraic symbol. It
was the Celtic strain in Buchanan's blood which made
him cling to this diaphanous spectre of Deity, though
there were moments when the Divine Donothingness
moved his passionately human heart to outcries of
revolt, as in that bitter parody, ' The Devil's Prayer,'
printed originally in the sixth section of ' The Book of
Orm ' : —

Father, which art in Heaven, — not here below ;

Be Thy name hallowed, in that place of worth ;
And till Thy Kingdom cometh, and we know,

Be Thy will done more tenderly on Earth ;
Give us this day our bread — since we must live ;

Forgive our stumblings, since Thou mad'st us blind ;
If we offend Thee, Sire, at least forgive

As tenderly as we forgive our kind ; —
Spare us temptation — human and divine ;

Deliver us from evil, now and then ;
The Kingdom, Power, and Glory all are Thine

For ever and for evermore. Amen.

The first of the * Antiphones,' which follow and
complete the ' Ballad of Mary the Mother,' opens with
the tremendous adjuration : —

How can I love Thee, God that madest me ?
Who saith he loves Thee, lies !

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 91

a statement which the poet absolutely explained and
justified : —

Thy works, thy wonders, thine Omnipotence ?

Shall these awake my love ?
Nay, these are only phantoms of the sense

Whereby I live and move.

*****

I love my fellow men, I love this hound

Who gently licks my hand,
I love the land around me, and the sound

Of children in the land.

But Thee — I love not Thee ! — Stoop down, come near

To me whom Thou hast made.
That I may know Thee close, and hold Thee dear, —

But now I shrink afraid.

There's never a helpless thing surrounding me,

No timid bird or beast,
I love not better far, oh God, than Thee,

Tho' Thou be first, these least.

I love the maid I woo, the mother whose touch

I feel upon my brow.
The friend vv^ho grips my hand ! — for these are such

As I, and not as Thou.

Thou Vision of my Thought ! Thou Mystery

Of which men preach and rave !
I would not look, if Heaven held only Thee^

One foot beyond the grave !

I seek the gentle ones who once were near,

Not Thee, O light above, —
I crave for all who learn'd to love me here

And whom I learn'd to love !

More than one professedly religious journal de-

92 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

nounced this utterance as ' blasphemous.' Yet, after
all, what is it but another facet of the truth proclaimed
by Tennyson : —

Merit lives from man to man,

And not, O God, from man to Thee —

a Statement placidly accepted by all and sundry. The
fundamental idea is here the same as that expressed in
the dedication of ' The Wandering Jew ' to Buchanan's
dead father, ' Robert Buchanan, Poet and Social
Missionary ' : —

Father on Earth, for whom I wept bereaven,
Father more dear than any Father in Heaven —

and in it is clearly readable, to any sympathetic and
intelligent student of Buchanan's work, the spirit which
informed alike his work and his life.

Buchanan's early years had been absolutely godless,
in the sense that no form of revealed religion had ever
been brought to his notice during his childhood. He
was, as he has told us, ' born in Robert Owen's New
Moral World,' and had ' scarcely heard even the name
of God until at ten years of age ' he went to Scotland.
He became, he goes on to say, ' God-intoxicated from
the first moment he beheld the mountains and the
sea' — from the moment, that is to say, at which he
found his first revelation of the physical glories of
the world. From that moment until twelve years
later — the time of his wanderings in the Isle of Skye,
which prompted the writing of the ' Coruisken
Sonnets' — he probably, so to speak, took God for

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 93

granted, happy in an unexamined sense of the perpetual
presence of a wonderful and worshipful Maker of a
wonderful and delightful world. The Deity was a
trouvaille^ a wonderflil ' find ' he had made for himself,
and he was as contented in its possession as a child
who, having found a broken decanter-stopper, believes
himself the possessor of a Koh-i-noor. Then, in early
manhood, came the question, the chill of doubt, the
momentary blank negation, and afterwards the return
to a faith in some sort of Deity — undefinable, since, as
we have seen, he himself failed to define it. But the
doubt grew, and the faith diminished, because the facts
of life, strive as he would to keep before his eyes the
rose-tinted glasses of poetic and religious optimism,
grew in stern clearness of outline, and spoke unques-
tionable truths which would be neither gainsaid nor
ignored. Sorrow and sin and sickness and death ;
unmerited suffering, war and prostitution and hunger ;
the brutal follies of men in high places ; the daily
failures and stumblings of all men, hurtful to them-
selves and to those about them ; abortive effort and its
grim set-off, undeserved success — these, and all the
other thousand ills of flesh, must needs be looked at
and their existence recognised. And side by side with
such personal experiences was working the eager love
for every kind of knowledge which could be found in
the recorded experience of other men. Though, when
they assailed too closely that nebulous Deity to which
to the last he persisted in clinging, Buchanan would
sometimes petulantly repel the leaders of modern

94 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

science, and denounce the light they brought as a mere

Jack o'Lantern, he could not repulse it, and for the

last thirty years of his life he was an eager student

of modern scientific literature. He could say, with

his own Vanderdecken,

All this season

During my residence among you,
I've searched the poor, stale scraps of reason

Your last philosophers have flung you.
I've read through Comte, the Catechism,
(Half common sense, half crank and schism).

And Harriet Martineau's synopsis ;
Puzzled through Littre's monstr' informous
Encyclopaedia enormous.

Until my brain grew blank as Topsy's.
I've sucked the bloodless books of Mill,

As void of gall as any pigeon ;
I've swallowed Congreve's patent pill

To purge man's liver of Religion ;
I*ve tried my leisure to amuse
With Freddy Harrison's reviews ;
I've thumbed the essays of John Morley,
So positive they made me poorly : —

* * *
The Leben yesu, Renan's Vie^

I also studied thoroughly ;
I vivisected cats with Lewes,

I tortured gentle dogs with Ferrier,
Found out just what grimalkin's mew is,

And how tails wag in pug and terrier ;
But came, however close I sought,
No nearer to the riddle of Thought.

* * *
Then finally, in sheer despair,

Burn'd deep with Scepticism's caustic

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 95

Found Spencer staring at the air.
Crying, ' God knows if God is there ! '
And, in a trice, become agnostic !

So catholic a study of modern thought could have but
one result upon a normal intelligence.

Cosmogony,
Geology, ethnology, what not —

which Bishop Blougram speaks of as

Greek endings, each the little passing bell
That signifies some faith's about to die —

are rather to be compared to mordant acids, fatally-
certain to eat out the heart of the robustest faith ; though
some hollow simulacrum, like Buchanan's ' God ' may
still be left erect in some dark corner of the mind.
Frequently, in his earlier work, Buchanan consoled
himself, as did Tennyson, by the dream of a God who
was not indifferent, but merely working out with
infinite pity and infinite patience an all-embracing
scheme of salvation, in which wretchedness and wrong
were only temporary expedients, to be justified presently
to the sufferers by the granting of a fliller knowledge.
One may be glad that he passed through such a phase
of thought, for out of that phase came much noble and
beautiful work, as, for instance, ' The Vision of the
Man Accurst ' in ' The Book of Orm.' In this Vision,
the poet beholds the world after the Day of Judgement,
a solitude but for one Man

Who had sinned all sins, whose soul
Was blackness and foul odour,

^6 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and whose dread fate it is to wander among the deserts
of earth in a solitude and silence broken only by his
own blasphemies. Summoned after a period to the
presence of God, he is still fiercely unrepentant, and
defies God by the mouth of God's ambassador : —

He saith his Soul is filled
With hate of Thee and of Thy ways ; he loathes
Pure pathways where the fruitage of the stars
Hangeth resplendent, and he spitteth hate
On all Thy children ....

God asks, ' What doth he crave ? '

Neither Thy Heaven, nor Thy holy ways.
He murmureth out he is content to dwell
In the Cold Clime for ever, so Thou sendest
A face to look upon, a heart that beats,
A hand to touch — albeit like himself,
Black, venomous, unblest, exiled, and base ;
Give him this thing, he will be very still.
Nor trouble Thee again.

But there is not ' in all the waste of worlds,' another

like the Man Accurst, ' the basest mortal born,' but God

says —

Yet 'tis not meet

His cruel cry, for ever piteous

Should trouble my eternal Sabbath day.

Is there a spirit here, a human thing.

Will pass this day from the Gate Beautiful

To share the exile of the Man Accurst —

That he may cease the shrill pain of his cry,

And 1 have peace ?

Two shapes answer to this appeal, and, at the

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 97

Divine command, reveal themselves as the mother and

the wife of the doomed wretch. Both plead to be

allowed to share his exile, though he had slain the one,

and made the life on earth of the other a long and

cruel torment. And

The man wept.

And in a voice of most exceeding peace
The Lord said (while against the Breast Divine
The Waters of Life leapt, gleaming, gladdening) :
* The man is saved : let the man enter in ! '

The idea here is, as will at once be seen, identical
with that which informs the 'Ballad of Judas Iscariot,''
the most popular and widely known — one is glad to
know, for the credit of the popular judgment — of all
Buchanan's briefer pieces. It is the note of all that is
finest and best in Buchanan's achievement. In these
two poems, the Tennysonian faith

That not one life shall be destroyed

Or cast as rubbish to the void

When God hath made the pile complete —

is very beautifully exemplified. But the study of life
and of the lessons of modern science were disintegrating
any such hope, and so, in Buchanan's deeper work,
viewed as a whole, there is to be beheld a curious
spectacle — the spectacle of a man who, clinging with
despairing grip to a shibboleth, yet frequently belabours
the figure whose label is the very shibboleth itself
The calm indifference of d. faineant Deity, sitting aloof
in ' impotence ot Godhead,' stirred the poet to warn

H

98 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and lecture the Celestial Majesty in a fashion which the
orthodox believer was quite justified in thinking dis-
respectful. In this same ' Book of Orm,' the poet
addresses the Deity in the following terms —

Master, if there be Doom,

All men are bereaven !
If, in the universe
One Spirit receive the curse,

Alas for Heaven !
If there be Doom for one.
Thou, Master, art undone.

# # *

Art thou less piteous than
, The conception of a man ?

In ' The City of Dream ' a cognate idea is set forth
with logical sobriety : —

That duty the created owes
To the Creator, the Creator, too,
Owes the Created. God hath given me life ;
I thank my God if life a blessing is ;
How may I bless Him if it proves a curse ?

In the already quoted ' Devil's Prayer ' and in a
passage of ' Carmen Deific ' (' The New Rome '), the
statement is stronger : —

If I were a God like you, and you were a man like me.
And in the dark you prayed and wept and I could hear and see,
The sorrow of your broken heart would darken all my day.
And never peace or pride were mine till it was smiled away, —
I'd clear my Heaven above your head till all was bright and

blue.
If you were a man like me, and I were a God like you.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 99

Here, we are far indeed from the God Who pardoned
Judas Tscariot and the Man Accurst ; far away from the
* solace and certainty ' which, in another time and mood,
the poet had found on ' the shore of the celestial ocean.'*

It is, of course, obvious that since God includes
Christ, and since an always impersonal and finally
utterly nebulous Deity could hardly be conceived as
begetting carnal offspring, the unescapable corollary of
the theological evolution I have attempted to trace was
the categorical denial of the Divine parentage of Jesus.
I doubt if, at any period of his life, Buchanan was ever
a Christian in the dogmatic sense — the only sense in
which, it will be remembered, he permitted the use of
the word. I doubt if ever he was a Christian, as Byron
phrased it, ' on consideration,' though the personal
character and ethical teaching of Christ were the objects
of his constant admiration — if, indeed, ' worship ' would
not be a better word. His ' Balder,' a character on
whom he lavished every divine quality, every beauty of
benignity and tenderness, is obviously meant as a
study of the character of Christ ; and in the poem as a
whole there is more than a mere germ, there is a dis-
tinct foreshadowing, of the gigantic conception which
informs his greatest work, ' The Wandering Jew.' The
two poems should be read in succession, and, so read, a
striking resemblance between their themes becomes at
once apparent . Both protagonists are of divine birth, both
are informed wholly with a passion of pitying tenderness

* Sec the last book of ' The City of Dream.'

100 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

for all living things. Balder is the object of his Father's
fear and hatred ; Christ, in the latter poem, is not
hated by his Divine parent — he is simply the sufferer
by His cynical carelessness and indifference.

'The Wandering Jew' was published in 1893. I
was privileged to hear it read by its author from stage
to stage of its production, and, while greatly struck
and excited by its splendid qualities of idea and treat-
ment, I prophesied for it a critical scarification com-
pared with which any former onslaught on the author's
work would be fulsome eulogy. To be just to the
English Press, my prediction was almost completely
falsified. One or two journals did indeed assail the
book with unmeasured abuse, a midland daily of large
circulation and influence describing it as ' a weltering
mass of foul accusations,' and ' the morbid dream of an
egotistic rhymer.' Miss Marie Corelli,with that genius
for self-advertisement which distinguishes her, rushed
into print with a denunciation of the book and its
author. ' There would be,' said Miss Corelli, ' some-
thing inexpressibly funny in a Robert Buchanan pro-
nouncing doom on Christ, if it were not so revolting, —
a critical impertinence easily to be corrected by sub-
stituting for the name ' Robert Buchanan ' the name
' Marie Corelli,' and for ' Christ,' ' Robert Buchanan.'*
But the general voice of the Press was to a quite
different effect, and, though many critics failed alto-
gether to perceive the true purport or meaning of the
-poem, the notices as a whole were candid and generous.

* See article on ' The Master Christian.'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. roi

Even more surprising to relate, the Pulpit took up and
advertised the book by the mouths of several of its
most distinguished orators. * Let me say,' said the
Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, ' that it will do all orthodox
and devout Christians immense and endless good to
read, ponder, and remember the attack upon historic
and ecclesiastical Christianity which this poem utters. I
say that nothing better could be done than that Robert
Buchanan should rub these facts well into our eccle-
siastical skins. I freely admit that through all the
centuries the name of Christ has been identified with
every kind of devilry. . . . There is nothing in this
terrible poem to give intelligent Christians fear.' In
that last phrase Mr. Hughes was no doubt doing his
best to make the best of a bad case, but his frank
recognition of much that is true in the book, coming
from such a source, was exceedingly grateful. Dr.
Joseph Parker said that ' Mr. Buchanan was on his
way to the eternal altar ' — a true and pregnant phrase,
though hardly, I think, in the fashion its author hoped.
The story of ' The Wandering Jew ' is indeed as
tremendous a conception as has ever entered the
mind of man, and its conduct reveals Buchanan at
his best. The Poet is wandering, desolate and heart-
sick, through the snowy streets of London on the
night of Christmas Eve, when he hears ' a tremulous
voice cry out in pain,'

' For God's sake, mortal, let me lean on thee ! '
And peering through the dimness I could see
Snows of" white hair blown feebly in the wind ;

102 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

And deeply was I troubled in my mind

To see so ancient and so weak a wight

At the cold mercy of the storm that night,

And said, while 'neath his wintry load he bent,

' Lean on me, father ! ' adding, as he leant

Feebly upon me, wearied out with woe,

* Whence dost thou come? and whither dost thou go?*

O then, meseemed, the womb of Heaven afar
Quickened to sudden life, and moon and star
Flashed like the opening of a million eyes,
Dimming from every labyrinth of the skies
Their lustre on that Lonely Man ; and he
Loom'd like a comer from a far countrie
In ragged antique raiment, and around
His waist a rotting rope was loosely bound,
And in one feeble hand a lanthorn quaint
Hung lax and trembling, and the light was faint
Within it unto dying, tho' it threw
Upon the snow beneath him light enew
To show his feeble feet were bloody and bare !

The Poet's first clear idea of the old wayfarer's
identity is that he is Ahasuerus, the ' Wandering
Jew' of legend, but, seeing upon his frozen hands
the stigmata of the Great Sacrifice, he recognises

The lineaments of that diviner Jew
Who like a Phantom passeth everywhere,
The world^s last hope and bitterest despair,
Deathless, yet dead.

Anon, the Poet finds himself

upon an open Plain
Before the City, and before my face
Rose, with mad surges thundering at its base.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. loj

A mountain like Golgotha ; and the waves
That surged round its sunless cliffs and caves
Were human — countless swarms of Quick and Dead!

Here, a figure sits in Judgement : —

Human he seemed, and yet his eyeballs shone
From fleshless sockets of a skeleton.

A shadowy advocate rises from amid the mass, and opens
his speech for the prosecution with the adjuration : —

O Judge, Death reigned since Time began,
Sov'ran of Life and Change ! and ere this Man
Came with his lying dreams to break our rest
The reign of Death was beautiful and blest !
But now within the flesh of man there grows
The poison of a dream that slays repose,
The trouble of a mirage in the air
That turneth into terror and despair ;
So that the Master of the World, ev'n Death,
Hated in his own Kingdom, travaileth
In darkness, creeping hunted and afraid.
Like any mortal thing, from shade to shade.
From tomb to tomb ; and ever where he flies
The souls of men shrink with averted eyes,
And call with mad yet unavailing woe
On this Man and his God to lay Death low.
Wherefore the Master of the Quick and Dead
Demandeth Doom and justice on the head
Of him, this Jew, who hath usurped the throne
The Lord of flesh claims ever for his own.
This Jew hath made the Earth that once was glad
A lazar-house of woeful men and mad
Who can yet will not sleep, and in their strife
For barren glory and eternal Life
Have rent each other, murmuring his Name !

104 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

In a passage of some hundreds of lines, packed close
with splendid imagery and eloquence, the Advocate
extends and presses this accusation, the clanging periods
of his oratory closing with the tremendous line —
I demand doom and justice on this Jew !

Then appear the witnesses for the Prosecution — Judas,
Ahasuerus, Pilate, Nero, Julian, Hypatia, some soli-
tary, others attended by vast cohorts of dumb followers.
Then comes Mahomet, escorted by the innumerable
millions who have hailed him as the Prophet, and

Buddha

Star-eyed and sad and very beautiful ....

He spake, the throngs who follow' d bent like grass

Wind-blown to worship him !

Zoroaster, ' crowned like a king,' Menu and Moses,

Confiicius and

Prometheus, dragging yet his broken chain
And gazing heavenward still, in beautiful disdain.

They pass in interminable procession,

Each kingly in his place, and in his train
Souls of fair worshippers that Jew had slain.

The souls of mitred Popes and priests, of Galileo and of
the innumerable nameless martyrs of science ; Justinian,

The Master of the Templars, du Molay,
Clasped by the harlot. Fire,

Abelard and Eloise, Frederick,

Pale Petrarch, laurel-crow^ned, gazing on

The white face of that sister wobegone

Who through the lust of Christ's own Vicar fell —

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 105

Huss and Columbus and de Gama and Magellan ; and

from West and East, vast swarms of the victims slain

in the name of Christ ; Montezuma and the last of the

Incas. Then comes Voltaire, with Calas blessing and

embracing him ; and after him Holbach, Diderot, and

the rest,

The foes of Godhead and the friends of Man,

and finally, the innumerable hosts of Israel,

The children of the Ghetto, gathering there,
His brethren, fed their eyes on his despair,
And spat their hate upon him.

It would be impossible, without transcending all
precedent in the way of free quotation, to give the
faintest idea of the oceanic effect of this series of
pictures, which, alone among painters, Gustave Dore
might have realised in form and colour. Challenged
to produce his Witnesses, Jesus replies

' Hosts of the happy Dead whom I have blest ! '

'- Call ! Let them come ! '

* I would not break their rest ! '

' Thou hast lied to them, O Jew ! ' the dark Judge
cried.

And Jesus said, ' O Judge, I have not lied ! '

' False was thy promise — false and mad and drear —
There is no Father ! '

' Father, dost Thou hear ? '

io6 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

For the last of many times, Jesus looks heavenwards
for some sign. None comes, and the Judge resumes : —

' Enough. Renew thy miracles, and prove
Thy words, O Jew ! From yonder void above
Summon the Form, the Face, in all men's eyes
And we absolve thee ! '

On the starry skies,
Still thinly shrouded with the falling snow,
He fixed his wistful gaze, and answered low,
' I bide my Father's time.'

John the Precursor, and ' that other John '

Whom Jesus to his breast
Drew tenderly, because he loved him best,

Mary the mother and her gentle namesake the Magdalen,
appear and testify, and at the summons of Paul,

Shapes of dead Saints arose, a shining throng,

But the greater throng of the victims of his false priests
clamour them down and shriek for judgment. And
Judgment is spoken, in words no man who has ever
once perused can forget, at least in spirit and in essence.

Since thou hast quickened that thou canst not kill.

Awakened famine thou canst never still,

Spoken in madness, prophesied in vain,

And promised what no thing of clay shall gain.

Thou shalt abide while all things ebb and flow.

Wake while the weary sleep, wait while they go,

And, treading paths no human feet have trod,

Search on still vainly for thy Father, God ;

Thy blessing shall pursue thee as a curse

To hunt thee, homeless, through the Universe ;

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 107

No hand shall slay thee, for no hand shall dare
To strike the Godhead Death itself must spare !
With all the woes of Earth upon thy head,
Uplift thy Cross, and go ! Thy Doom is said.

And lo ! while all men come and pass away.
That Phantom of the Christ, forlorn and grey,
Haunteth the Earth with desolate footfall ....

God help the Christ, that Christ may help us all !

The commonest critical error made in envisaging
this poem was in describing it as a direct and frontal
attack upon Jesus. That to a certain extent of course
it is, but it is also a flank assault. The Rev. Hugh
Price Hughes set his finger on its central significance
in admitting ' that through all the centuries the name
of Christ has been identified with every kind of devilry.
The failure of Christ has been a failure to leave a
Christ-like human progeny, to make the seed of his
divinely beautiful spirit flourish in the rocky and
thorny soil of human nature. The poem is at least
as much a denunciation of the stupidity and cruelty of
man as of the splendid and heroic folly of the greatest
of the Paracletes, for whose nature and teaching it
breathes nothing but love and admiration. ' I dis-
tinguish absolutely,' writes its author, ' between the
character of Jesus and the character of Christianity
— in other words between Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus
the Christ. Shorn of all supernatural pretensions, Jesus
emerges from the gross mass of human beings as an
almost perfect type of simplicity, veracity, and natural

io8 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

affection.' 'According to my critics it is secularism, and
not Christianity, which is played out " intellectually."
If they mean by " secularism " the base and irreverent
spirit which gibes and mocks at the beautiful dream of
Jesus, and in so doing defames the stainless elder brother
of all suffering men, I am cordially at one with them ;
but if they mean by secularism the spirit which rejects
all compromises and frauds, however innocent, which
affirms that the business of humanity is not to wear
sackcloth and ashes, but to enlarge the area of its own
happiness, and which incidentally, by way of illustra-
tion, points out the evils that other-worldliness has
brought on man, I take leave to say, that at no time
in the world's history has secularism exercised so benign
an influence over the lives of all who think and feel.
, ... It is only in so far as Christianity is itself secular
that it is of the slightest influence upon the age in which

we live It is because the nebulas of [Christ's]

love never cohered to an orb of rational piety, because
mere sentiment can never save man till it changes into
a science of life ; because if this world is not something
joyful and beautiful, all other worlds are dismal de-
lusions, that Christ's message to humanity has been
spoken in vain. Human love and self-respect, human
science and verification, human perception of the limit-
ation of knowledge, have done more in half a century
to justify God and prove the Godliness of life^ than the
doctrines of other-worldliness have done in nineteen
hundred years.' Mark, in the second of the phrases
here underlined, the curious obsession already alluded

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 109

to, the clinging to the shibboleth of a name which
had ceased to denote any fixed or definable idea.
Eliminate that, and the rest of the utterance might,
in spirit and essence, have proceeded from the pen of
Thomas Huxley.

As an allegory, ' The Wandering Jew ' is assuredly
abundantly justified. For the last fifty years Christ has
indeed been standing at the bar of human judgment,
and his claim to divine birth — which in this poem
Buchanan, for purely artistic purposes, tacitly admits —
has been ruthlessly demolished, but not more ruthlessly
than his ethico-social influence. ' The religion of
Jesus has never really triumphed at all, except in the
area of priestly politics and popular superstition. Our
time has been wasted, we have been made the sport of
a kindly thaumaturgist, for nearly nineteen hundred
years.' *

And the verdict of Humanity has veritably been the
verdict that Buchanan has recorded. The wan and way-
worn figure of the Christ — ' Deathless, yet dead ' — haunts
the sad world, no living presence, but the shadowy
wraith of a beautiful dream and a great lost purpose,
feebly wandering towards final dissolution and oblivion.

And it is because Robert Buchanan bravely recog-
nised and fearlessly proclaimed the vanity of dreams to
which his contemporaries clung, that I believe that
posterity will accord to him a lofty pedestal in our
national Pantheon, as the first great poet to make the

* Prose Note to ' The Ballad of Mary the Mother.'

no ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

choice of his own Balder, to turn his back upon the
discredited hierarchy of Heaven and to stay on earth
with Man. He obeyed the logic of his nature, he dared
to * follow his brains,' to accept the counsel of his own
Daemon, the great ^Eon,

Fear not, love not, and revere not,
What transcends your understanding,
Keep your reverence and affection
For the brethren vv^hom you know.*

With unwilling and sometimes retrograde steps, he
arrived ultimately where we now find him, discarding
by the way many pleasant dreams, many happy fictions,
his heart and brain in incessant conflict, the first clam-
ouring at all costs to believe, the latter sternly insisting
on the sacredness of Truth.

The creeds I've cast away
Like husks of garnered grain.

As Mirabeau with political, so he with theological
formulas — il les avait Humes tons. From a brief period
of God-intoxication, through many doubts and battles
and fluctuations, he came at last to face the facts of
Life and Death, with only the thinnest veil of mysticism
to hide their stern nakedness. Thin as that veil was,
it was growing ever thinner. From the broken arc we
may divine the perfect round, and it is my fixed
belief that, had the subtle and cruel malady which
struck him down but spared him for a little longer

* ' The Devil's Case.'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. iii

time, he would logically have completed the evolution
of so many years, and have definitely proclaimed him-
self as an Agnostic, perhaps even as an Atheist.
Tennyson, who ' crushed ' his doubts

like a vice of blood
Upon the threshold of the mind,

might cling to the outworn superstition expressed in
the lines of the second ' Locksley Hall ' —

Truth for truth, and good for good ! The Good, the True,

the Pure, the Just —
Take the charm 'For ever' from them, and they crumble

into dust —

but with a man of Buchanan's robuster temperament,
to whom Doubt was a troublesome, but still a welcome,
guest, such a belief, absolutely incompatible with
historical fact and daily experience, could not long
abide. Even Ruskin, hide-bound religionist as he was,
could rise to a loftier conception of human nature than
to think that it must needs tumble into nothingness the
moment it let go of the apron-string of some grand-
motherly Deity.

A brave belief in death has been assuredly held by many
not ignoble persons; and it is a sign of the last depravity in
the Church itself, when it assumes that such a belief is incon-
sistent with either purity of character or energy of hand. The
shortness of life is not, to any rational person, a conclusive
reason for wasting the space of it which may be granted him;
nor does the anticipation of death, to-morrow, suggest, to any
one but a drunkard, the expediency of drunkenness to-day.
To teach that there is no device in the grave, may indeed
make the deviceless person more contented in his dullness: but

112 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

it will make the deviser only more earnest in devising : nor is
human conduct likely, in every case, to be purer, under the
conviction that all its evil may in a moment be pardoned, and
all its vi^rong-doing in a moment redeemed ; and that the sigh
of repentance, which purges the guilt of the past, will waft
the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain — than it may
be under the sterner, and to many not unwise minds, more
probable, apprehension, that ' what a man soweth that shall
he also reap' — or others reap — when he, the living seed of
pestilence, walketh no more in darkness, but lies down therein.*

Entire races, to whom it never occurred to look
* one foot beyond the grave,' have produced societies as
excellent, and individual natures as noble and unselfish,
as have ever been suckled on the feeding-bottles of
revealed religion, and the more than inexpediency of
proclaiming Atheism in Christian countries has naturally
resulted in placing the declared Atheist perforce among
the worthiest individuals of his generation. Militant
Atheism is, of course, as absurd a blunder as militant
Theism. The plain fact of the matter is that we do
not know, and, by the very constitution of the human
intelligence, never can know, the nature of the forces
which environ us ; and it is as foolish to regard them
as malevolent as to proclaim their benignity. They
are neither malignant nor benign, they are simply
indifferent.

The world rolls round for ever like a mill ;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill ;
It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will.f

* ' The Crown of Wild Olive ' (Introduction),
t James Thomson, ' The City ot Dreadful Night.'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 113

Science and philosophy, speaking by the pen of
their best-furnished exponent in this generation* have
divided the entire Cosmos into two perfectly clean
halves, the ' Knowable ' and the ' Unknowable,' and
the cultured common-sense of the world has accepted
this ruling. If it had but been earlier done — if all the
priceless enthusiasm, all the energy, all the effort and
time and money which have been wasted on the
propaganda of revealed religion had been concentrated
on the elucidation of the laws of nature, the culture of
the intellect, and the relief and prevention of human
suffering, in what a different world we should all be
dwelling now ! We, of this generation, may at least
be glad that we live in the dim dawn of another and a
better day, a day in which men of intellect will frankly
recognise the necessary limits of their own intelligence,
and be content to work ' while their brief light endures'
towards tangible ends and assured results, leaving the
Eternal Mysteries where they must needs remain, in
the realm of mystery. Humanity has too long wasted
its time and effort in prostrations as barren of result as
the exercises of St. Simeon on his pillar :

I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light.
Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,
To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the Saints.

If mankind is ever to arrive at happiness it will not
be by the worship of any Fetish, concrete or invisible,

* Mr. Herbert Spencer, ' First Principles.'

I

114 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

but by arduous study and slow conquest of the immut-
able laws by which it is surrounded. Buchanan had
come to recognise so much ; he was indeed on his way,
as Dr. Parker said, ' to the Eternal Altar,' the Altar
of the Religion of Humanity, which was standing
before any other was built, and will endure when every
other has crumbled to the dust. I am not ignorant
how contemptuously he more than once turned his back
on the fane in which that Altar burns : —

Worship Man ? Go back once more
To image-worship as of yore,
And bend my head and bow my knee
To this King Ape, Humanity?
This stomach-troubled, squirming, aching.

Mud-wallowing creature of a day.
This criticising, this book-making,

Fretful, dyspeptic thing of clay !
This multi-face whom it hath taken

Ages to learn to wash and dress !
This horde of swine, doomed to be bacon.
And now, by countless devils o'ertaken.

Shrieking in impotent distress !
This mass of foulness and of folly

Through whom the Paracletes have died I
This Yuletide carcase decked with holly

In honour of its Crucified !
Now great Jehovah lies o'erthrown.

Shall the mere pigmy reign at last ?
Pshaw ! rather worship stick or stone.

And let Humanity crawl past ! *

The old leaven, ' the filthy virus of the obscene

* I

The Outcast.*

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 115

vaccination of Faith,' as Gerald Massey years ago
called it, worked furiously in his veins at times; the
cherished superstitions clung like mandrake in the soil
of his mind, and were only torn up with groans as of
the parting spirit. Such a passage as this must be set
beside the entire bulk of his last ten years' work, and,
so placed, its very virulence of denial amounts to an
assent. It was the Poet of the dual personality pro-
testing, and protesting vastly too much, against the too-
cogent logic of the Thinker.

ii6

Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Algernon Charles Swinburne. A Critical Study, by-
Theodore Wratislaw.

IV/fR. SWINBURNE'S ultimate position in the
•*-^-*- hierarchy of English literature will certainly
not depend on the judgment of any individual critic,
and in that reflection I find a warrant for complete
candour in setting my opinion of him in juxtaposition
with that of such an enthusiastic worshipper as
Mr. Wratislaw. That he is a poet, one of the
real authentic God-born race whose credentials are
absolute and undeniable, I admit. The claim seems
to me to allow of but one answer. But he is
rather a unique than a great singer, and a reader
whose first flush of youthful enthusiasm has passed
hesitates to set him shoulder by shoulder with the
greatest of his kind. It has been claimed for him, by
older and more responsible critics than Mr. Wratislaw,
that he is the supreme verbal artist the language has
produced. I should rather say — the supreme verbal
juggler. - The great stylists are the great thinkers, and
Mr. Swinburne deals far more in emotion — and often
very nebulous and misty emotion — than in thought.
He has never had much to tell us, beyond the facts

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 117

that wine is sweet and women are kissable — facts with
which the world was fairly well acquainted before his
advent. We feel in him the lack of that solid core of
vital heat, that fire of lofty conviction which throbs in
the verse of Milton and Shelley. And he has dread-
fiilly frequent moments in which his pen runs away
with him, in which his ' revel of rhymes ' becomes a
revel of mere melodious nonsense ; moments in which
he is no longer the master of his materials, but their
servant and slave. It was in such a moment that he
penned the dedication of the first series of ' Poems and
Ballads ' to Edward Burne-Jones, the first four lines
of which mean nothing whatsoever in reality, while
such semblance of meaning as they possess is absolutely
self-contradictory : —

The sea gives her shells to the shingle.
The earth gives her streams to the sea ;

They are many, but my gift is single,
My verses, the first ft-uits of me.

Grant that ' verses ' and ' first fi*uits ' are ' single,' what
does the statement amount to ? And what is its
connexion with the immediately following adjuration : —

Let the wind take the green and the grey leaf,

Cast forth without fruit upon air ;
Take rose-leaf and vine-leaf and bay-leaf
\ Blown loose from the hair. . . . ?

I

One might guess that the 'vine-leaf* was in the
ascendant when such a verse was written. This is not

ii8 JLGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

the utterance of the divine Sybil, Poesy, but the jibber-
ing of the mad witch, Echolalia. Nor does it stand alone
in Mr. Swinburne's work. Did space permit, I could
supplement it by the dozen. Apropos of this phase of
the question, Mr. Swinburne, in trying to sneer at
Byron, paid him one of the solidest compliments ever
offered to a poet. ' On taking up a fairly good version
of " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," in French or Italian
prose, a reader whose eyes and ears are not hopelessly
sealed against all distinction of good from bad in
rhythm or in style will infallibly be struck by the
vast improvement which the text has undergone in
the course of translation. The blundering, floundering,
lumbering, and stumbling stanzas, transmuted into
prose and transfigured into grammar, reveal the real
and latent force of rhetorical energy that is in them :
the gasping, ranting, broken-winded verse has been
transformed into really efi^ective and fluent oratory.'
Did Mr. Swinburne ever think of trying the same
experiment on such specimens of his own verse as I
have quoted above.'' Turned into an alien tongue,
stripped of its liquidity of syllable, its alliteration and
assonance, how would such verse show ^ It would have
no longer even the semblance of a meaning. Byron, with
his ' ramping renegades and clattering corsairs ....
violent and vulgar resources of rant and cant and glare
and splash and splutter ' .... his ' sickly stumble of
drivelling debility '.,..' his drawling, draggle-tail
drab of a muse, Inyx, the screaming wry-neck ' — Byron
had at least something to say, and said it — something

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 119

so well worth saying that the mere verbal clothing
of the idea ceased to matter much — a new sermon
on the eternal text, ' The Body is more than the
Raiment,'

Mr. Swinburne and his prophet, Mr. Wratislaw,
are, I cannot help thinking, both a little ' previous '
in declaring Byron to be dead. As good old Sandy
Mackay, in ' Alton Locke,' remarks concerning Mr.
Windrush's information to the same effect regarding
the Devil : ' I'd no bury him just yet — wait till he
smells a wee grewsome.' Premature interment is a
serious business.

Mr. Wratislaw can hardly be complimented on the
delicacy of his critical discrimination. He claims Mr.
Swinburne as a great dramatist. So far from being
anything of the kind Mr. Swinburne is essentially and
hopelessly undramatic — it might be said, anti-dramatic.
One of the many gifts necessary to the writing of drama
is the power to project oneself into the personality of
the personage depicted, to think, act, and speak, not
as William Shakespeare or Richard Sheridan, but
as Hotspur or Bob Acres. Mr. Wratislaw challenges
our admiration for the following lines, put into the
mouth of the Doge, Marino Faliero : —

If these who have wronged me, being wiped out,
May leave this Venice with their blood washed white.
Clean, splendid, sweet for sea and sun to kiss
Till earth adore and heaven applaud her — then
Shall nny desire, till then insatiable,
Feed full and sleep for ever.

120 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

Such involutions of imagery and language could never
get across the foot-lights with the faintest effect, and,
if they could, the voice is the voice, not of the heroic
and tremendous traitor, but of Mr. Swinburne. The
passage has no dramatic quality whatever. Mr.
Wratislaw's overwhelming tendency to eulogy-at-any-
price runs him into quaint extravagances at moments.
He tells us, regarding the tragedy of ' Bothwell,' that
' its conventional five acts run to the unconventional
length of five hundred and thirty-two pages of about
thirty lines apiece,' and on the same page, adds ' only
the historian who has the details of Mary Stuart's
career at his fingers' ends in competent to appreciate
the dramatic ingenuity of condensation and selection
exhibited in this volume ! ' ^ ' Dramatic ingenuity of
condensation ' is admirable in such a connexion^
especially when one remembers that one single speech
of John Knox is nearly as long as the tragedy of
' Hamlet ' even when played, as recently by Mr.
Benson, ' in its entirety.' Mr. Wratislaw might, of
course, retort that Mr. Swinburne's dramas are not
intended for stage representation. In that case, why
choose the dramatic form ? A drama not meant to be
acted is as futile as a song not meant to be sung.

Concerning * Atalanta,' Mr. Wratislaw has a phrase
more pregnant with meaning than he himself would
seem to be aware. ' Such a poem as " Atalanta " is an
admirable example of the trite saying that a poet is
born, not made. It was published by its author at the
age of twenty-eight, but twenty or thirty years of

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 121

study and practice of literature have not given to the
poet a surer hand, a sweeter note, or a swifter imagina-
tion.' So far from having progressed, either as a
thinker or a writer, during the last thirty years, Mr.
Swinburne has steadily deteriorated in both particulars,
presenting in that respect a curious and interesting
contrast with the two greatest of his contemporaries,
Tennyson and Browning. To read Tennyson's poems
in chronological order of composition is one of the
most delightful of literary exercises. His voice
deepened and sweetened with every passing year, from
the clear, bird-like note of the * Juvenilia ' to the organ
music of 'The Revenge ' and ' The Siege of Lucknow;'
and the splendour of his workmanship makes welcome
and almost lovable the flat banality of his treatment of
the noble Arthurian Legend. There are moments
when I think ' In Memoriam ' the top summit of
English poetic achievement. Age dulled — though only
very slightly — his great gift, but in ' Crossing the Bar '
he wrote a masterpiece of Jess than a score of lines
worthy to stand beside any other nameable piece of
English verse. Browning was an even more remarkable
phenomenon ; he seems to have issued from the Eternal
Intelligence like Minerva from the brain of Jove, full-
statured and full-equipped. His work varies in quality,
of course, but the hand which wrote ' The Ring and
the Book,' though it was the agent of a fuller know-
ledge and a riper experience, was hardly more deft and
certain in its perfection of craftsmanship than that
which penned ' Paracelsus.' Even of ' Pauline,' of

122 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

whose defects Browning was so conscious that he only
republished it under the pressure of transatlantic piracy,
it can only be said that it is ' poor Browning :' the
Browning quality, the depth of thought, the vigour of
expression, the wealth of innate and unearned know-
ledge of the human heart and brain, are finely evident.
Most genuine poets resemble Tennyson rather than
Browning in this matter, notably the two greatest of
the post-Revolutionary period, Shelley and Keats, who
clarified the rather sickly vintage of ' Queen Mab ' and
' Endymion ' into the sacramental wine of ' Adonais '
and ' Hyperion.' But Mr. Swinburne resembles
neither of these classes. He has emulated neither the
wider and higher flights of Tennyson nor the stately
march along the Alps of poetic power of Browning.
His career has been a long exercise in the sad art of
sinking. Never either a deep or a just thinker, he has
run to seed in a mere revel of senseless sound. " That
Mr. Wratislaw should have emerged from the monu-
mental task of reading Mr. Swinburne's entire literary
output in such a condition of unqualified admiration is
a certificate to the strength of his literary digestion, as
well as to his unshakable fidelity of affection. He
exults over even that weltering waste of wild and
whirling words, the volume of critical ' Miscellanies,'
which, when I read it on its first appearance, took a
still-unchallenged position in my memory as the most
voluminously voluble statement of nothing-at-all within
the scope of my personal experience.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 123

The dictum that Mr. Swinburne is the most musical
of all English poets has by this time hardened to the
consistency of critical dogma, a commonplace of
universal acceptance. Thk he is a marvellous artist in
that respect, that he has treated nearly every established
metre with a grace and beauty of execution beyond all
praise, and that he has enriched our literature with
some new and admirable forms of rhythm, it would be at
once idle and unjust to deny. But there is to me, even
in his superb mastery of the technique of his art, an
element of disquiet — I feel, after reading a certain
quantity of his verse, as Charles Lamb describes himself
feeling at an instrumental concert — that I must rush
out into the familiar clatter of the street traffic to get
away from the endless, meaningless succession of sweet
sounds. In the homely image, he piles butter on bacon
and honey on sugar, driving the aching sense to nausea
with the dead, inevitable beat of his rhythm and the
irritating recurrence of alliteration and assonance. He
seems a sort of poetic Blondin, keeping perilous foot-
hold on an imperceptible wire in mid-air, and
surrounded by blazing coruscations of rockets and
crackers. It is seldom that his theme interests and
exalts him into forgetfulness of his rather vulgar and
meretricious trickeries, and such happy moments have
become rarer and rarer of recent years ; until such
portions of his verse as are truly poetic in thought and
artistically modest in expression, set beside his endless
exercises in rhythmical calisthenics, stand like the
proportion of bread to the quantity of sack in FalstafF's

124 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

tavern-bill. It is but seldom that one finds, in the vast
and glittering sand-heap of his later productions, those

— jewels five-words-long
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever.

Mr. Swinburne's thick-and-thin admirers, of whom Mr,

Wratislaw is the type in excelsis, are rather in the habit

of talking as if he were the original inventor and

patentee of verbal music, whereas no style in all

literature has a clearer ancestry than his. He is the

direct offspring, as an artist, of Shelley and Keats and

the despised Byron, and he has a distinct dash of

Thomas Moore. And, great as he unquestionably is

as a verbal artist, his finest work is never finer than

much of that of his predecessors, and, to my thinking,

often contrasts but poorly, merely as music, with the

finest achievements of the greatest of his fellow poets.

His florid and over-laboured rhetoric seems tawdry, set

beside the solemn splendours of Milton's description of

how Pandemonium ' rose like an exhalation ;' it sounds

cracked and thin contrasted with the iron periods of

Dryden : —

Of whatsoe'er descent their godhead be —
Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,
In his defence his people are as bold
As if he had been born of beaten gold.

I find no echo, in his insistent and self-conscious
trickery, of the elusive dream music of Coleridge : —

— carven figures, strange and sweet,
All made out of the carver's brain ;

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 125

^^ ' It fanned his brow, it raised his hair.

Like a meadow gale in spring ;
It mingled strangely with his fears.
Yet it seemed like a welcoming ;

or Shakespeare's

Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay
Who twice a day their withered hands hold up
To heaven, to pardon blood : and I have built
Two chantries^ where the sad and soletnn priests
Sing still for Richard's soul —

lines in which Mr. Swinburne's favourite trick of
alliteration ceases to be a trick at all. Compare any
specimen of Mr. Swinburne's onomatopoeic verse with
these lines from ' The Dream of Fair Women ' —

As one that museth where broad sunshine laves
The lawn by some cathedral, thro' the door

Hearing the holy organ rolling waves
Of sound on roof and floor

Within, and anthem sung —

or with the same poet's

Heated hot with burning fears.

And plunged in hissing baths of tears.

And battered by the shocks of doom

To shape and use.

I find in him none of the nameless, mystic, moon-light
charm which permeates ' The Eve of St. Agnes,' and
* The Witch of Atlas.' It is a commonplace among
his more laudatory critics that no English poet has
ever succeeded as Mr. Swinburne has done in conveying

126 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

into our language the sculpturesque sense of the finest
Greek verse. It is a point on which I must speak with
diffidence, and under grave chances of censure, but to
me, who know Greek literature only by the medium
of translation, no fragment of Mr. Swinburne's verse
has ever conveyed the sentiment of vast strength in
calm repose — which I take to be the essential beauty
of the great Greek style — as it is conveyed in
Browning's superb fragment, ' Artemis Prologises ' : —

I am a goddess of the ambrosial courts.
And save by Here, Queen of Pride, surpassed
By none whose mansions whiten this the world.
Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along;
I shed in hell o'er my pale people peace ;
On earth I, caring for the creatures, guard
Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek.
And every feathered mother's callow brood.
And all who love green haunts and loneliness.
Of men, the chaste adore me, hanging crowns
Of poppies red to blackness, bell and stem,
Upon my image at Athenai here —

a flawlessly beautiful composition, seeming to suggest
long lines of lucent statuary beheld by dim moonlight
in a forest glade. And where, among all Mr. Swin-
burne's cold and glittering mosaic, can one find a
passage like the song of Pippa ^

Overhead the tree-tops meet.
Flowers and grass spring 'neath one's feet ;
There was nought above me, nought below
That my childhood had not learned to know.
For what are the voices of birds —

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 127

Ay, and of beasts, but words, our words.

Only so much more sweet.

The knowledge of that with my life begun.

And I had so near made out the sun

And counted your stars, the seven and one.

Like the fingers of my hand —

Nay, I could all but understand

Wherefore through heaven the white moon ranges,

And just when, out of her soft fifty changes

No unfamiliar face might overlook me —

Suddenly God took me.

Such verse as that brings with it the breath of the
beyond, and its rhythm stirs heart and feet like wine.

The first series of ' Poems and Ballads ' is the
volume by which Mr, Swinburne will live, and its
back may be broad enough to carry ' Atalanta ' and
' Erechtheus.' It contains pretty nearly all that Mr.
Swinburne has to tell us, and the splendid audacity of
the cry of the Neo-Pagan —

What ailed us, oh gods, to desert you
For creeds that refuse and restrain ?

Come down and redeem us from virtue,
Our Lady of Pain !

will ring in the hearts of men for ever as the expression
of the sensuous side of the complex human organism.
That is all — or very nearly all — that Mr. Swinburne
has ever had to express, and it is that fact which bars
him from companionship with the greatest of his kind.

128

A French View of Ruskin.

RusKiN AND THE RELIGION OF Beauty. Translated from
the French of R. de la Sizeranne by the Countess of
Galloway.

1^^ USKIN has been exceedingly fortunate in finding
-* '- so admirable an interpreter of his life-work
to the French people as M. de la Sizeranne, and
M. de la Sizeranne is to be most heartily con-
gratulated on having found such a translator as the
Countess of Galloway. Of all writers who have
ever lived, perhaps Ruskin has most need of sympa-
thetic introduction to a foreign audience — most
especially, perhaps, to a French audience of the
actual moment. The poles are hardly wider
asunder or more diametrically opposed than the
gospel of Art as propounded by the Prophet
of Coniston, and its doctrines as proclaimed by
the fashionable French critics of to-day and
illustrated by French artists of the most extended
vogue. The mass and extent of Ruskin's work
are of themselves grave obstacles to its proper
understanding, even in England, and are well
nigh insuperable bars to such a comprehension
among foreign readers. Mr. George Allen has

A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSK IN. 129

■obeyed a happy inspiration in publishing the Countess
of Galloway's excellent translation of this admirable
book. Criticisms and appreciations of Ruskin abound
and are daily multiplied, but I know of none among
them which so admirably fulfils its purpose as the
volume now under consideration.

If it were ever wise to prophesy concerning
such matters it would seem safe to predict that
Time, which has covered with disdainful silence so
many loud-resounding contemporary reputations, will
<ieal tenderly with the fame of John Ruskin, His
position merely as a writer, as a verbal artist, is certainly
secure. Merely as literature, one may say of his
work what Michael Angelo is reported to have said
regarding the dome of St. Peter's Cathedral, in answer
to some carping critic who had dwelt upon an
alleged error in its construction : ' Sir, it cannot be
better done.' No writer of the English tongue has
ever surpassed him in the prime quality of style, in
the absolute clarity and level strength of his utterance.
He played upon the language like Sarasate or Joachim
upon the strings of the violin, with complete and
facile mastery. His views of every one of all the
many human interests with which he dealt — of art,
and life, and morals, and contemporary politics —
have been frequently disputed and passionately re-
pudiated. Perhaps his actual and tangible effect upon
his generation has been less than his strongest partisans
would proclaim it to have been — it could hardly have
been less than he himself frequently declared it to be —

K

I30 A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSK IN.

but he has for many years past been a real factor in
the moral and intellectual life of the English-speaking
peoples of the globe, and he represents so much
that is most truly and deeply characteristic of those
peoples that it is not easy to imagine him falling
out of their consideration. Only England could have
produced him, as only England could have produced
Milton. He represents all that is best and highest
in the spirit of Puritanism; not the narrow and
misanthropic creed which teaches contempt of human
joy, but the high and beneficent spirit which turns
delight itself into a sacrifice. He will never be
widely popular outside the country which gave him
birth, because he was so particularly the incarnation
of its spirit, and it is one whose workings are
almost exclusively confined to the English section
of the great Teutonic stock. It has never touched
more than an insignificant minority of any Latin
race, and then only for a brief moment. It per-
vades the entire English character as the perfiame
proper to a certain flower pervades the entire
structure of that flower. It gives a touch of
austerity to our most characteristic virtues, it adds
a smack of relishing horror to our vices. Every
Englishman is more or less a Puritan, and so it
may be said that Ruskin has some message for
every Englishman who possesses the modicum of
intelligence necessary to feel an interest in the themes
with which he deals. His fame would seem to be
secure, because the remotest generation of our race

A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSK IN.

131

will produce individuals of his mental and moral
order, and because it is not thinkable that any
teacher can ever arise who will preach with more
persuasive eloquence or more convincing force the doc-
trines which he has made it his life-business to expound.
The strengths of great individualities are often their
weaknesses, and it was so in the case of Ruskin. His
absolute, uncompromising intransigeance on the main
points of his doctrines — artistic, social, political — is the
secret of the passionate love and admiration with which
he is regarded by the picked minority of his readers
who are in full sympathy with those doctrines ; but it is
the secret also of the limitation of his power over his
generation as a whole. He was all his life unwaver-
ingly certain of the truth of his view of things in
general ; he proclaimed, as with thunders of Sinai, the
absolute necessity of the entire world to subscribe to
the laws he formulated. He had the Puritan narrow-
ness which refuses to see any truth outside of the truth,
it preaches. To that order of mind, the catholic
charity which would dictate such an utterance as that
of Robert Buchanan :

There dwells, within all creeds of mortal birth

That die and fall to earth,

A higher element, a spark most bright

Of primal truth and light ; —

No creed is wholly false, old creed or new,

Since none is wholly true —

is something very like a blasphemy. There was no
truth but the truth of which John Ruskin was the

132 A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSK IN.

prophet. This intolerance was born in him, part and
parcel of his nature, and one can hardly imagine a
scheme of education more calculated to indurate it than
that through which he passed in his early years. We
know the facts as they are loosely scattered through
the pages of ' Praeterita,' let us re-read them as briefly
recapitulated by M, de la Sizeranne.

As shy and retiring in society as successful in business,
Mr. John James Raskin lived much alone, happy in the com-
panionship of the romantic and the legendary creations of his
favourite authors. His wife, who had been brought up amongst
people inferior to the Ruskins, was not at home amongst her new
connections. Too intelligent to ignore the fact and too proud
to submit to it, she determined to renounce the world, — a
religious and devoted mother who kept the 'Christian Treasury'
on her table and the hatred of the Pope in her heart, abhorring
the theatre and adoring flowers, uniting the spirit of Martha to
that of Mary, indefatigable, well regulated, living only for her
husband and her son. To avoid separation from the latter
during his university career, she brought herself to live a
stranger in Oxford, watching continually to save him from all
pain, even should she unman him, and from all danger, at risk
of taking from him the power to avoid it. Each day with order
and regularity she gave him a Bible lesson, and revealed to him
by degrees that light of the Old and New Testaments which
has ever shone on the summits of his achievement. The child
had not a conception of what care was. The Ruskins never
spent more than the half of their income, and were free from
all money troubles. Finding all their joy in admiration, they
were ignorant of all the pangs of jealousy and ambition. To
live in a cottage and to taste the ' healthy delight of uncovetous
admiration ' in visiting Warwick Castle was a greater happiness
to them than * to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to
be astonished at.' Their even temperaments were warmed to

A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSKIN. 133

enthusiasm only by ideas or by the contemplation of Nature.
* Never,' says their son, ' had I heard my father's or mother's
voice once raised in any question v/ith each other. I had never
heard a servant scolded.' ' Under such gentle discipline there
reigned in this house peace, obedience, and faith.'

Shielded from all external trouble, the artistic taste of the
boy was refined into a sort of ecstatic habit.

At Heme Hill he passed the long winter months dreaming
over Turner's illustrations to Rogers' ' Italy,' and a violent
desire took possession of him to know in what aliquas partes
materia the great seer had seen his vision. In the valleys of
Clifton or of Matlock in Derbyshire he made collections of
minerals, calculated heights, and watched reflections. And all
that he perceived with a mind so precocious and overflowing,
he loved with a heart strangely virgin and void ; for he had
little sentiment for his family. ' My mother, herself, finding
her chief personal pleasure in her flowers, was often planting

or pruning beside me, at least if I chose to stay beside her

Her presence was no restraint to me, but also no particular
pleasure, for, from having always being left so much alone, I
had generally my own affairs to see after.' Sixty years after-
wards he sadly exclaims, ' I had nothing to love. My parents
were in a sort visible powers of nature to me, no more loved
than the sun and the moon.' And as a child he knew no one
else. Even when travelling the Ruskins lived apart from their
fellows and preferred watching the great poet Wordsworth from
behind the pillar of a church, to asking for an introduction.
* We did not travel for adventures, nor for company, but to see
with our eyes, and to measure with our hearts.' Their mode
of travelling enabled them to see everything thoroughly, and
their ignorance of foreign languages prevented them from re-
garding the people from any other than the picturesque point of
view. They found a peculiar charm in the very fact of being
unable to understand the speech of those around them. Yox so
they noted each gesture but for its beauty, each voice but for
its music, and neither one nor the other for its significance.

134 A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSK IN.

Trained in this special manner, all the child's faculties
tended to one result — an acute sensibility, a power of minute
analysis of landscape and figures.

One can see in this passage the planting and the
germination of much that is beautiful in Ruskin's
life and work, but also of much which frustrated his
growth and lessened his strength. It was the life
of a human plant in a hot-house. The cloistering
influence was too constant, too all-enveloping ; free
winds and natural sunlight were too rigorously ex-
cluded. Such a training was bound to leave behind
it a super-sensitiveness, an over-delicacy, an ignorance
of human needs, an intolerance of human frailty; and
that ignorance and that intolerance are marked
characteristics of Ruskin's work, and militate strongly
against its usefulness. The average man cannot but
feel that, ultimately right and true as his teachings
may be, they are, after all, perilously like those most
useless of human utterances, counsels of perfection.
It is good to read them, as it is good to read the
Commandments of Moses and the Beatitudes of
Christ ; but to make of them the rules of daily conduct
is a strain beyond the strength of poor humanity.
Temperament and fortune combined with early teach-
ing to make such a scheme of existence a realisable
possibility to Ruskin, but one cannot but think that
had the hazards of life forced him, by the imperious
necessity of earning his daily bread, into closer kinship
with the mass of struggling humanity, the knowledge
and the tolerance so gained would have made his

A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSKIN. 135

teachings more fruitful of actual and tangible effect.
There is something in them

Too bright and good
For human nature's daily food.

There is, in the following passage, a note of admiration
I find it hard to echo : —

This mystic reverie of contemplation, rapture, and ecstasy,
whether of joy or sorrow, is the principal feature in the in-
dividuality of Ruskin. Once immersed in it, nothing rouses
him. Events take place around him without his giving them
so much as a thought. Sometimes he has passed weeks with-
out so much as knowing what agitated his country. Khar-
toum fell with the heroic Gordon ; the news had not reached
him, and when the Soudan was mentioned, he thought of the
figure painted by Giotto at Santa Croce, to face St. Francis
of Assisi, and asked curiously, ' But who is the Soldan of
to-day .'' ' Even family events did not seem to deserve atten-
tion. Whilst in the Alps he heard of the death of his cousin
Mary, the companion of his youth and of his early travels,
but he did not pause in his endeavour to reproduce the effect
of sunrise on Montanvert, and the ' aerial quality of Aiguilles.'
Even in his old age he remains ever the same — the boy his
mother soothed in childish illness by bidding him think of the
sky and seas of Dover. The close of ' Praeterita ' reveals no
melancholy echo of what the aged Petrarch described as ' the
superfluous cares, the futile hopes, and the unlooked-for
events,' which had agitated him during his life on earth. No
trace of this — but a last note on the infinite and marvellous
forms assumed by the "■ upper cirri ' of the sky in the pure
air of Kent and Picardy when not ' disturbed by tornado nor
mingled with volcanic exhalation,' and a thrill of joy in the
thought that the clouds which float over the English coasts
are as full of beauty as those which hover round the Alps.
And in those final pages, where speaking of himself he might

136 A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSKIN.

have betrayed or grieved over the secret dramas of his life,
the great enthusiast does not seem to avert his gaze for an
instant from the radiant horizons of Eternal Nature, the sum
of all he has loved on earth.

Such absolute abstraction from human interests is not a
strength. It is a weakness, and a deadly one.

These two passages seem to me to shed a revealing
light upon Ruskin's entire work, to furnish the key
which unlocks the mystery of his being, to explain
at once the strength and the weakness so inextricably
mingled in his teaching. So an angel might look
on life, but hardly a man; and it is by the men
who have been most intensely human that the truest
and most abiding words of counsel have been spoken.
Read this passage on the two pictures of Bellini,
the Madonna in the Sacristy of the Frari, with two
saints beside her and two angels at her feet ; and the
Madonna with four saints over the second altar of
San Zaccaria. They express the same sentiment of
aloofness from human passion and human struggle : —

Observe respecting them —

First, they are both wrought in entirely consistent and
permanent material. The gold in them is represented by
painting, not laid on with real gold. And the painting is so
secure, that four hundred years have produced on it, so far
as I can see, no harmful change whatever, of any kind.

Secondly, the figures in both are in perfect peace. No
action takes place except that the little angels are playing on
musical instruments, but with uninterrupted and effortless
gesture, as in a dream. A choir of singing angels by La
Robbie or Donatello would be intent on their music, or
eagerly rapturous in it, as in temporary exertion : in the little

A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSK IN. 137

choirs of cherubs by Luini in the Adoration of the Shepherds,,
in the Cathedral of Como, we even feel by their dutiful
anxiety that there might be danger of a false note if they
were less attentive. But Bellini's angels, even the youngest,
sing as calmly as the Fates weave.

Let me at once point out to you that this calmness is
the attribute of the entirely highest class of art : the intro-
duction of strong or violently emotional incident is at once a
confession of inferiority.

Those are the two first attributes of the best art.
Faultless workmanship, and perfect serenity ; a continuous
not momentary action. You are to be interested in the living
creatures, not in what is happening to them.

Then the third attribute of the best art is that it compels you
to think of the spirit of the creature, and therefore of its face,
more than of its body.

And the fourth is that in the face you shall be led to see
only beauty or joy — never vileness, vice, or pain.

Those are the four essentials of the greatest art. I repeat
them : they are easily learned.

1. Faultless and permanent workmanship.

2. Serenity in state or action.

3. The Face principal, not the body.

4. And the Face free from either vice or pain.

This beautiful, but quite unhuman, quietism is the
dominant note of Ruskin's teaching. It is admirably
expressed by M. de la Sizeranne in a passage of his
own ; a passage worth quoting because it not only
clearly speaks the spirit of the Master, but because it
exhibits both the author and the translator of this fascin-
ating volume at their artistic best.

We are to follow then, in all forms of art ; painting,
sculpture, architecture, the paths Nature traces for us when
we behold her with love, and we must seek after her teaching

138 A FRENCH VIEIF OF RUSKIN.

even in the smallest technical detail. Her first teaching is
that of repose — repose in colour, repose above all in move-
ment. Her transformations are not rapid, her gestures are
not vehement. The tree slowly extends itself towards the
sun ; the sun sinks by degrees behind the mountain ; the
mountain stands immovable for centuries. Natural phenomena
rarely exhibit those rapid changes of scene which are the joy
of children in fairyland. Full-grown men will marvel more
at the slow miracles of germination or at the gradual growth
of islands emerging from the sea, the product of myriads of
tiny insects during myriads of years. In art we must then
deprive ourselves of all representation of tumultuous events,
of violent scenes, of figures which run, dance, fall, struggle,
or wound ; pictures of battles, of the Last Judgment, of
Bacchanalian feasts, of martyrs in great contortions of pain,
victims nailed to doors, and Christs dying on the Cross.
We must condemn naturalism in death in the name of
Nature's life, and also dying Christs in the name of her
serenity. Simple shepherds kneeling around a cradle, the play
of a fountain under the sky, the touch of a bow on a string,
a procession of knights to a church, the slow march of am-
bassadors along a canal, the depression of Melancholy amid
the tools of science, the fall of roses from the finger-tips of
an angel one by one on to the soft form of the infant Christ
playing below — these are the movements which we may re-
produce, because they do not shock our instinct of ' per-
manence.' The shepherds of Lorenzo di Credi may retain
for any length of time their caressing posture; the monks of
Mont Salvat and the great nobles of Carpaccia may pass
eternally before our eyes without fatigue, Diirer's figure may
remain leaning perpetually on her hand as motionless as a
caryatid, and the angel of Botticelli shall strew his flowers
everlastingly.

Since the fundamental law for one art must
necessarily be a fundamental law^ of all departments

A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSKIN. 139

of art, it is a little difficult to reconcile such dicta
as these with Ruskin's oft - proclaimed admiration
for many writers whose chief strength lies in the
portrayal of vivid action and strong passion — notably,
Dante and Shakespeare. It is even more difficult
to reconcile them with much that Ruskin himself
has written, in which either the reality or the
affectation of passionless calm would be sought wholly
in vain. Save for studied propriety of language,
Swift or Carlyle could be hardly more fiercely
personal than Ruskin has been upon occasion, and
all his life has been passed in passionately fighting
in the cause of peace. This, of course, amounts to
no more than saying that all the celestial influences
which dwelt about his youth and early manhood
have after all left him only a man, and a man of
peculiarly vivid, if somewhat narrow interests, and
even narrower sympathies. We must accept him as
we accept all high manifestations of human greatness,
since to wish him otherwise than as he is would be
quite vain. Loftiness of purpose and splendour of
native capacity have won for him a high place in
the Valhalla of English Worthies, and no more
stainless name is inscribed upon the long bead-roll
of English genius.

140

Ruskin and Carlyle.

Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and other Literary Esti-
mates. By Frederic Harrison.

THE diffidence with which I might, in other
circumstances, approach the consideration of
this volume is tempered by the fact that it is only
with a (numerically) insignificant number of its pages
that I have to deal. A book from a writer of Mr.
Harrison's eminence, touching on so many diverse and
powerful personalities, might ask from its critic a far
fuller acquaintance with its author's former work than
I can boast. Some of the judgments contained in this
volume seem more than a little strange to me, probably
because I know so little of the bulk of the work which
has won for its author his high position among the
leaders of modern English thought.

The cognate circumstance that, though I was for a
longish period of my intellectual life an ardent student
of Ruskin's work, I have yet only a very imperfect
knowledge of the vast mass of literature he has left
behind him, does not add to my diffidence one whit.
For this simple reason — that he who has read, with
patience and understanding, any single one of Ruskin's
really characteristic books, has to all true intent and

RUSKIN AND CARLTLE. 141

purpose read every word that Ruskin ever wrote. His
three hundred volumes, ranging as they do over so
illimitable a field of human effort and human emotion,
are but as one, and almost any one among them is as
the whole three hundred. The half-dozen books
which the unerring instinct of the cultured public has
selected from the mass — ' Modern Painters,' ' Sesame
and Lilies,' ' Unto this Last,' ' The Crown of Wild
Olive,' and ' The Two Paths,' are certainly all that the
average student, who has his daily bread to earn, and
cannot afford to give his entire scanty leisure to the
study even of the most gifted single personality, really
needs to read. Truly to know Ruskin's work in its
entirety would ask a scholarship as vast as Ruskin's own ;
to absorb its most valuable parts, its spirit and essence,
is within the ability of any thoughtful man who really
reads any of the books whose title I have mentioned, or
even one of many scores of well-known passages which
might be selected from their pages — such a passage, for
instance, as that in which he speaks of the degradation of
the Carshalton brook and the cockney, tawdry splendour
of the neighbouring public-house. All his life long he
went on repeating, with inexhaustible fertility of illus-
tration and ever-changing melody of language, the one
lesson given to him to teach his generation ; that the
living God had built this world as a Temple wherein
the living soul of Man should worship Him, and that
to befoul a stone of the pavement, or darken a pane of
the windows of the holy edifice is an insolent and
unpardonable blasphemy. ' Reverence ' is the word

142 RUSKIN AND CARLTLE.

which sums up the spirit of Ruskin's teaching; reverence
for earth, and sky, and water, for grass, and flower, and
tree, for the bodies of men and souls of children. He
would have us stand, not ' as ever in a great task-
master's eye,' but as continually in the presence of an
inimitably generous and bounteous Host, Who has
opened to us all the glories of His House Beautiful,
Who asks only that we shall look with love and such
understanding as we possess upon the treasures He
displays, and to Whom carelessness or contempt of His
hospitality is rank ill-breeding.

I have said that this essay contains certain judgments
which surprise me. One of those judgments, inferred
rather than plainly spoken, is that Thomas Carlyle is
to-day as much of a living influence upon the minds of
Englishmen as he was fifty years ago, or at least
exercises as much moral and mental power as his con-
temporary, Ruskin. My own feeling about Carlyle is
that most of what he had to say worth the saying
was said very much better by Ruskin, and that, except
as a mere literary personality — as which he fills, and
will continue to fill, a high and unique position — he has
ceased to exist as a mental force altogether. His
anthropomorphism ; his loudly expressed and constantly
reiterated insistence on the 'great man* dogma; his
proclamation that the history of the world was mainly
the history of the remarkable human personalities which
had lived in it ; were a little belated even at the time at
which he preached them ; and are surely no longer
debateable in any company more highly intellectual than

RUSKIN AND CARLYLE. 143

that of a provincial Young Men's Mutual Improvement
Society. The central positions of Carlyle's creed were
abandoned by Carlyle himself, not publicly, it is true,
but in privately-spoken words which can leave no doubt
of their sincerity. When Froude began to speak of
what God might do if He willed to do it, Carlyle cut
him short with the three simple and tremendous words,
' God does nothing ' — an utterance which swept away
a fair half of the ground on which the imposing edifice
of Carlyle's life-work was founded. On another occasion
he 'gave away' his cherished ' great man' theory just
as completely. In more than one published utterance
he had called, with his usual vitriolic vehemence, on
some absolute monarch of some over-crowded European
State to sweep his cities of the famine-stricken wretches
who were so dire a menace to the prosperity of the
country they cumbered, and to transplant them to the
wilds of America and Australia, that they might make the
desert blossom as the rose, and add to the wealth of the
world instead of to its misery. And in one of the
last conversations he held with his biographer he
remarked how all this had been done, not by any
arbitrary exercise of kingly power; not at the cost of
millions of violently severed hearts; but by the quiet,
steady, benignant action of natural human forces, by
the exercise of the free initiative of free-born men. To
dethrone the meddlesome celestial drill-sergeant, which
was Carlyle's conception of the Deity, and to substitute
for him a Dieu faineant ; to recognise that evolution and
national selection, left to themselves or only gently and

144 RUSK IN AND CARLTLE.

tenderly encouraged, are infinitely better than the fussy
and ill-considered action of hot-headed potentates, is to
abolish Thomas Carlyle altogether as a sociological
teacher. To me, and to many others, it is all but
incredible that a man who could hint anything but con-
temptuous abhorrence of negro slavery — at once the
sum of all crimes and the top-summit of imbecility —
should ever have been accepted in such a capacity.

The resemblance between Ruskin and Carlyle seems
to me to have been purely superficial, and the frequent
bracketing of their names — less frequent than it was,
and growing daily rarer — is based upon a misconception
of the real natures of both of these extraordinary men.
I know that Ruskin spoke often of Carlyle as ' the master,'
and that he often repeated and applauded fragments of
Carlyle's utterances. But there was, au fond^ very little
real sympathy between them. Their great bond was
their common hatred of Democracy. Both cackled as
loudly — and as vainly — after the generation which,
obeying, as all generations must, the inevitable impetus
of innate forces, took to the muddy stream of Radical-
ism, as the old hen who saw the ducklings she had un-
wittingly hatched plunge into the farm-yard pond.
Both saw the coarseness, the irreverence, the ignorance,
the blatancy, which were the flaws of the democratic
scheme, and — too often — of its loudest expounders.
Neither possessed the equanimously hopeful spirit
possessed and inculcated by men like J. S. Mill and
Herbert Spencer, who, looking with ' larger, other
eyes ' on the march of humanity, know from how many

RUSK IN AND CARLYLE, 145

apparently impassable quagmires Man has emerged
triumphant in the past, and so can, by analogy,
prophesy hopefully of the future. In a word, both
men were impatient; both were guilty of doubting the
ultimate wisdom of the God of Whom both talked so
often and so much. But Ruskin did, all the same,
verily believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself.
Ruskin's impatience was of a noble kind, Carlyle's of
an ignoble. Ruskin was grieved that the generation
with which his life was cast should deny God. Carlyle
was violently angry that anybody should deny Carlyle,
or should presume to think otherwise than he thought,
should act without his advice, or except under the
guidance of some Imperial bully he approved. 'Ruskin,
half seraph and half shrew,' was, all the same, half
seraph. Carlyle was all shrew, degenerating, as Lowell
said of him, * from a prophet to a bad-tempered old
gentleman who called down God's lightning from heaven
every time he couldn't lay his hand on his match-box.'
Ruskin's frequent virulence of speech resulted from his
intense appreciation of an ideal good which a less
highly-strung nature would have seen to be unattain-
able. Carlyle's sins of the same kind were the out-
come of inordinate vanity and of a callous contempt of
human rights and human suffering. The gods of his
idolatry were Frederick the Greedy and Napoleon the
Bowelless. Ruskin's perfect State would be one in
which every living soul reverently sought for truth and
beauty, and passionately loved the teacher who could
make them most readable to him in the sometimes

146 RUSK IN AND CARLTLE.

crabbed hieroglyphics of the world. Carlyle's Civitas
Dei would have been one in which humanity grunted
and sweated under the heavy load imposed by some
gigantic, iron-willed taskmaster, as Germany grunts
and sweats to-day under the rule of William. Ruskin's
reHgion came from his heart, Carlyle's from his liver..
What we know of the private lives of the two men
widens the gulf between them. Ruskin's greatest wor-
shippers were his relatives and servants, and hundreds —
it might be no exaggeration to say thousands — of living
men and women love and reverence him as a generous
personal friend and a patient personal teacher. Carlyle
broke his wife's heart, and I have never heard of any
living soul to whom he gave a sixpence or for whose
help or comfort he would have walked a mile. Ruskin's
books — the simpler volumes, such as I have mentioned
above — should be put into the hands of every child
as soon as — or before — he can understand their plain
meaning. Their extravagances would be corrected by
his growing experience, their tenderness and beauty
would act on a sensitive nature like rain and sunshine
on a flower. Nobody should read Carlyle's books till
he is of an age to bring his own experience of the world
as a necessary counter-poison, till he can smile at their
atrabilious denunciations of things in general, and relish
their one truly valuable quality — literary excellence.

A circumstance that renders Ruskin's admiration
for Carlyle still more strange is that Carlyle was, both
by temperament and training, scornfully indifl^erent of
so much that Ruskin considered of cardinal importance.

RUSKIN AND CARLTLE. 147

At this moment I remember only one single passage in
Carlyle's entire work which deals with any artistic
matter outside the range of literature, an account,
reprinted in one of his 'Miscellany' volumes, of an
evening he spent at the opera, written in a tone of
boorish contempt for the * vanity ' of any kind of stage-
production. The whole note of the article is one of
wonder that men and women with immortal souls to
save should waste their time in squalling and capering for
the amusement of a crowd of full-fed cockney dilettantes.
In conversation he spoke frequently with the most galling
contempt of Ruskin's cherished belief in the powers of
painting, sculpture, and music as aids to the higher
life. On these and on all cognate subjects Carlyle's
outlook was and remained that of the sternest and
most impenetrable Scotch Calvinism, His Puritanism
was as different from that of Ruskin as darkness is
different from light. It was the Puritanism of ignor-
ance and negation, as opposed to that of knowledge
and culture — the Puritanism, not of Milton and
Hampden, but of Corporal Bind-their-kings-in-chains-
and-their-nobles-with-links-of-iron. Spiritually, as well
as physically, he hailed from Ecclefechan, and never
succeeded in emancipating himself from the angry con-
tempt of the Scottish peasant against the graces and
amenities of life.

One of the most important links of affinity
between this curiously ill-matched couple was their
tolerance of war — an institution which the majority
of public teachers of their time regarded with

148 RUSKIN AND CARLTLE.

unmitigated abhorrence as the essence of all evil.
But the sentiment was based on very different
foundations in the minds and natures of the two
men. To Carlyle war was admirable because, of all
human pursuits, it was the one in which a man, with
the cold and brutal strain of domination he called
* heroism,' could most absolutely prove his contempt
of human suffering. He more than tolerated war — he
loved and desired it, and for that reason. Ruskin's
feeling about it was very different. He expressed
the feeling in many passages of his writings and
lectures, and in none more plainly or more forcibly
than in the following excerpt from ' The Crown of
Wild Olive ' :—

It is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties
of men. It is very strange to me to discover this : and very
dreadful — but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. . . .
I found, in brief, that all great nations learnt their truth of
word and strength of thought in war, that they were nourished
in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war, and deceived by
peace ; trained by war, and betrayed by peace ; in a word,
that they were born in war, and expired in peace.

I can remember yet the tumult of emotion with
which, years ago, I first read this and similar
utterances, how wickedly false I thought them, how
strange and terrible it seemed that so gentle and
benignant a spirit as John Ruskin's should have
spoken them. It was not without reluctance that I
came to see that they were absolutely true to the
facts of history, and therefore, like any other facts.

RUSK IN AND CARLILE. 149

to be accepted, and fitted, as best they might be,
into the queer, heterogeneous mosaic of personal belief.
There seems to be no getting away from the root fact
that war is a necessity, in the sense that starvation and
so many other horrors are necessities — in the sense that
they are the inevitable outcome of the very constitution
of human nature, that none of all the multitudinous
generations of humanity has ever been fi-ee of them.
And, so much having been, however reluctantly,
recognised, it is an easy step to go further, and own
the value of war as a means of personal and national
education. All the declamation of the Manchester
politicians and the Peace societies leave untouched the
fact that many of the greatest and noblest human types
have been evolved by war, and have expressed their
great and noble qualities by the making of war ; and that
other fact that no congeries of men has ever crystal-
lised into anything really to be called a nation except
by strenuous resistance of lateral pressure from with-
out, and by resolute elimination of disintegrating forces
within — in a word, by War. Courage is the raw
material of all the virtues, and war is the school of
courage. The man, or the nation, who either cannot
or will not fight must perish. It is a flat contradiction
of all human experience to speak of war as an un-
mitigated evil, or of peace as in itself, and of necessity,
the sum of all blessings. A favourite theme with the
fashionable moralists of my youth was the good which
the money and energy wasted on war and in prepara-
tion for war might accomplish if diverted to the

150 RUSK IN AND CARLYLE.

furtherance of human happiness. But there never was
a time in which money and energy were so diverted to
their fiill values, and in all probability never will be
such a time. It is not a matter of the beautifully
simple choice between Maxim guns and schoolhouses,
between means of mutual destruction and mutual
education and improvement. The money and the energy
expended in war may be frittered away more uselessly,
and far more ignobly and harmfully, on the vices
fostered by peace, on sensuality and gross living, and
in snobbish display. Tommy Atkins, in his suit of
khaki, is surely a more respectable figure than Jeames
in his panoply of plush and Brummagem bullion ; and
my Lord Tom Noddy, cheerfully sharing Tommy's
short commons, or valiantly leading him through a
storm of bullets, is a quite infinitely better man than
he would be yawning away his days in the window of
his club-house and furiously expending his nights
in even more questionable resorts. Tommy the
proletarian and Tom the peer have only a very
moderate affection for each other in the piping times
of peace at home ; but put them together among the
slush and snow of a Crimean winter, or between the
naked rocks and burning sky of the Transvaal, with
a common foe to fight and conquer, and they learn
each other's value, and find other names to call each
other than ' snob ' and ' cad,' Norman and Saxon,
' foreign tyrant ' and ' churl ' to each other in the
days of peace, found the common name of ' English-
man ' on the battlefields of France. But yesterday.

RUSK IN AND CARLYLE. 151

a congeries of States became a nation by the same grim
process. Blood is a cement, and the sword can weld
together as well as cleave apart. To England,
with her vast and ever-increasing material wealth ; to
Englishmen, with their strong and somewhat coarse
appetites ; war may be the most salutary of disciplines.
England at death-grips with Napoleon was surely a
nobler spectacle than England during the long peace
which followed Waterloo, when for more than a
generation our one object was the acquisition of
money, and the sordid and stupid greed of the
newly-created capitalist class threatened to change a
beautiful island into a desert of ashes, peopled by a
handful of bloated plutocrats and a few millions of
anaemic operatives. ' The disease of our State is a
plethora.' We are continually on the verge of
national apoplexy. We shall inevitably die of it
some day, as Rome did, but periodic blood-lettings
have held the final catastrophe at bay so far, and
the fatal Writing on the Wall, though legible to keen
eyes, has not yet brightened to the blaze of final doom.

Ruskin has gone from among us, and, more truly
than were the words spoken by Tennyson of
Wellington, we may say 'the last great Englishman
is low.' There is no figure now erect among us so
venerable as his. He stood for some years, the Sir
Bedivere of the fallen host, the survivor of the
intellectual army which filled the spacious times of
great Victoria. Scott and Byron and Shelley were

152 RUSK/N AND CARLTLE.

living men and living influences during his early
life ; he lived and worked side by side with Tennyson
and Dickens, Thackeray and Browning, Mill and
Darwin, and saw them one by one fall into the gulf
of the eternal silence, which has at last absorbed him
too. His own verdict upon his long and strenuous
life-work was that he had failed. He said so, often
and bitterly. But ' failure ' and ' success ' are of all
terms the most comparative. To contrast the sum of
his accomplishment with the sum of what, in his ardent
youth, he had dreamed of efi^ecting, is a folly — in him,
a noble folly, in us, a most ignoble one. He failed, as
every great teacher of humanity has ever failed — as the
greatest of all, of whom he was so worthy a disciple,
failed. He did not drive stupidity and greed and
insolence from the hearts of men, nor the unsight-
liness, which is their material expression, from
the surroundings of their lives. He did not succeed
in making the huge and heterogeneous mass of
humanity see, as one man, eye to eye with him ;
or in making it accept doctrines which were but
too often as impracticable as they were beautiful.
But he succeeded largely, and for many years, in
tempering and restraining in his generation the evil
quaHties he hated; in lighting and sustaining, in many
hearts, the flame of pure enthusiasm for all things
lovely and of good report which burned so brightly
in his own.

153

Mr. Rudyard Kipling.

RuDYARD Kipling : An Attempt at Appreciation. By
G. F. Monkshood (W. J. Clarke).

TN his brief preface to this volume, the author, with
-■' a remarkably modest estimate of his own personal
powers as a hysterical panegyrist, describes it as ' an
attempt at appreciation.' It is a book of many vices,
and of not one solitary virtue. It is not critical, it is
not ' appreciative ' in any sense which can be rightly
applied to that nowadays much-abused word. It is
merely an additional — and quite unnecessary — proof
that whatever poor value criticism ever could of its
nature possess has been of late years squeezed out of
it, leaving behind nothing but the ' confounding oppo-
sites ' of fulsome flattery and venomous detraction —

So over-violent, or over-civil,

That every man to it is god or devil.

Being serenely certain that Mr. Kipling — supposiiig
him to care one jot about any individual opinion of his
work — would vastly prefer the sharpest admonition to
praise so absolutely worthless, I shall spare but little
further space for reference to Mr, Clarke.

The points of view from which literary work may

154 ^^- RUDTARD KIPLING.

be judged are, of course, infinite and infinitely diverse,
but there are two questions to ask regarding the work
of all men, which overtop all others in importance, and
are, ' What has he to say ? ' and ' How does he say it ? '
Being personally, for what I am worth in either regard,
an artist first and a moralist afterwards, I am by nature
inclined to give preference to the second of those almost
all-important considerations. I am a worshipper of
form, of strength and grace, of technical excellence, and
am so much of a heathen that I would any day rather
read a lie cleverly expressed than a truth clumsily
written. And that confession, in the present connexion,
is tantamount to saying that I am a fervid admirer of
Mr. Kipling's work, merely as literature. He seems
to me to possess in the superlative degree certain
literary qualities of prime importance. Merely as a
workman Mr. Clarke himself could hardly over-praise
him. There is no writer in the whole range of English
literature who can say with completer clarity the thing
he wants to say, who can strike with a surer finger the
exact note he desires to touch on the emotional key-
board. No man who has not tried, and tried hard, to
express himself through the medium of fiction, can
know at its full value Mr. Kipling's exquisite power in
that direction. The style of his best work is wholly
admirable; he has the genius of ' le mot juste;' he can
do more in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, or a word,
to establish about his reader the atmosphere in which
he desires him for the moment to move than most
Jiving writers of fiction could accomplish in the course

MR. RUDTARD KIPLING. 155

of a lengthy book. His words convey light, colour,
and perfume. Somebody said of Lord Beaconsfield
that * he talked like a horse racing.' That is how
Mr. Kipling writes, covering his ground with a motion
at once easy and rapid. There is no waste in his work ;
it is tense and athletic, accomplished with the ease and
completeness of a workman who is a perfect master of
the tools he uses and of the material he works in. He
has a rich and varied vocabulary, and except at odd
moments, when he is overcome by a rather foolish
desire to parade his verbal riches by writing ' poems '
flill of unintelligible technical gibberish, makes the best
possible use of it. He is a truly marvellous linguistic
juggler, doing all sorts of wonderful things with the
language, and tossing about his verbs and adjectives as
dexterously as Cinquevalli handles his heterogeneous
properties on the stage of the Alhambra. There is
more than one point of resemblance between the two
great ' manipulators.' They are both very strong, very
clever, perfect masters of their craft, and they are both
greatly beloved and admired by the music-hall public.

Mr. Clarke confesses that a certain percentage of
Mr. Kipling's enormous success must be ascribed to
luck. He enumerates certain elements which go to
compose that luck, but the enumeration is incomplete.
Mr. Kipling's luck is of many kinds, and all the kinds
are good. He has had the luck of his subject, and,
most important of all, the luck of his temperament.
His moral and intellectual diapason is that of the
crowd he caters for, that of the average Englishman of

156 MR. RUDTARD KIPLING.

all social ranks — that of the great music-hall public^
the most numerous, the richest, the most enthusiastic-
ally generous to its favourites of all possible publics.
Ethically, he is on the common level of the millionaire
in the boxes, the gilded votary of pleasure in the stalls
and promenade, the prosperous tradesman in the upper
circle, the city clerk in the pit, the street boy in the
gallery. Their gods are his, and he has the literary
talent which enables him to compile, in strong, co-
herent, and sonorous English, the litany of their wor-
ship. He could afford to be an infinitely poorer literary
artist than he is, without losing one grain of his popu-
larity with his real paying public ; he might have been
an infinitely finer artist, and have missed their suffrage
entirely, or even have earned their hatred. He tells
them what they love to hear, and what they cannot
hear too often, that they are the salt of the earth, and
the natural inheritors thereof; that, merely as English-
men, they are the aristocracy, not only of Europeans,
but of humankind ; that they are the strongest, wisest,
justest, kindest, bravest, and altogether most admirable
of God's creatures. And he believes it, too — with
whatsoever other failings one may charge Mr. Kipling
it is impossible to doubt the absolute sincerity of his
genuflexions before the great god Jingo.

There are moments when the critic who would
make plain the position in which he stands towards his
subject must momentarily intrude his own personal
feelings and beliefs in plain and definite language, and
this seems to me to be one of them, I accept, as the

MR. RUDTARD KIPLING.

157

statement of a plain fact, Emerson's royal compliment
to the effect that England is the best of actual nations.
I am proud to remember that Voltaire wrote, ' Si j 'avals
eu a choisir le lieu de ma naissance, j'aurais choisi
I'Angleterre,' I believe that no better fate could befall
Africa, or China, or any other country which has
lagged behind in the race of civilisation, than to fall
into the hands of England. And so, I hope I shall
escape the imputation of anti-patriotism when I go on
to say that the wild self-laudation which is nowadays
so common among Englishmen, which is roared and
bellowed from so many platforms, and echoed in the
columns of so many newspapers and the pages of so
many books, is essentially bad, base, snobbish, and
vulgar ; and that the wide popularity even of so
admirable an artist as Mr. Kipling, in so far as it has
been earned by pandering to so lamentable a failing. Is
a thing to be regretted. Brag is the vice of cads, and
the person — or the nation — who howls from morning
until night about his — or its — own exceeding strength
and valour lays himself — or itself — open to the charge
of rank ill-breeding. Hardly any English writer of
the first class has ever been guilty of it. The good
taste of Shakespeare's outbursts of patriotism is truly
remarkable, considering the period of political storm
and stress during which they were written. The one
note of vulgarity in Tennyson, to my thinking, is to be
found in his poem 'The Third of February, 1852 ' —

I say we never feared, and as for these —

We broke them on the land, we drove them on the seas.

MR. RUDTARD KIPLING.

To refer to the population of a great neighbouring
State by a disdainfully accentuated demonstrative pro-
noun is a curious slip in manners, and doubly curious
in so delicate and so just-minded a writer. It should
surely be the business of cultured and thoughtful men
rather to repress than to aggravate international ani-
mosities, to dwell upon the eternal verity of human
brotherhood rather than on the red fool-fury which
culminates in such devils' sabbaths as Waterloo and
Trafalgar. Perhaps my fashion of ' keeping ' days of
national glory is peculiar, but when, on the anniversary
of Nelson's victory and death, his statue is converted
into a gigantic Jack o' the Green; when all the con-
certinas of 'Arrydom are braying ' 'Twas in Trafalgar's
Bay,' and beery Cockneys are expressing their eagerness
to give the frog-eaters another solid good hiding; I
think of the woman Nelson loved and left to the tender
care of his country, and of how godly and grateful
England let her starve in squalid poverty, and bow my
head in shame. I would make a poem of that history,
if I had the skill, and — if I had the power — would have
it recited in every market-place in England on the
anniversary of Nelson's death. It would make a
healthy counterblast to the apotheoses of British virtue
to which the Press is so fond of treating us on similar
occasions, which, as Matthew Arnold pointed out years
ago, are not only ineffably vulgar, but are also re-
tarding. Best of actual nations as we are, we have our
share of public shames and private wrongs. A burden
worth the white man's taking up may be found nearer

MR. KUDYARD KIPLING. 159

home than Equatorial Africa, and it is well that we
should occasionally be reminded of that fact — * lest we
forget.'

It is never a gracious task to play the part of
Devil's Advocate, and it is least of all pleasing when
one is forced by a sense of critical honesty to do it in
the case of a writer whom in his place and for his own
particular merits, one greatly admires. I have received
much pleasure from Mr. Kipling's work in the past,
and hope to receive much more in the fliture. As a
story-teller, as a writer with the power of transporting
me beyond the cares and worries of every-day existence,
he has a high place in my affection. It is very seldom,
while I am actually engaged in reading his stories, that
I am even conscious of my ethical differences with him.
His buoyancy of spirit, his vivid and rapid style, carry
me along like a straw on the surface of a torrent. But,
the book once laid aside, the evanescent charm of story
and style evaporated, the spell is broken. The manner
of the speaker is forgotten, his matter is remembered.
There are moments, while his book is in my hands,
when the appellations of ' poet ' and * man of genius '
with which — in common with scores of scribblers who
possess not one-hundredth part of his power — he has
been so liberally bombarded, seem to be his unquestion-
able right. Most of the criticism of the present day is,
of course, written immediately after the perusal of the
books it deals with ; and I fancy that that circumstance
explains a good deal of the wild enthusiasm with which

i6o MR. RUDTARD KIPLING.

Mr. Kipling's work is habitually received. Such a
method of dealing judgment is far from the best
possible, especially in reckoning with the work of a
man whose great force, like that of a certain famous
statesman for whom Mr. Kipling has only a very
moderate esteem, is ' glamour.' Looking back on
Mr. Kipling's work in cold blood, ' genius ' and ' poet '
are among the last words I should be disposed to apply
to him. He is as far away from being a man of genius
as only an extremely clever man could be. For,
though there are degrees and gradations in genius as in
everything else, it is absolute in its division from talent.
Fancy anybody, except Lord Frederick Verisopht,
calling Shakespeare ' a clever man ' ! One would as
soon talk of Niagara as being ' sweetly pretty.' Com-
pared with men who really have a right to the name of
* genius,' Mr. Kipling is what a photographer is to a
master of the brush. He can see and reproduce the
surface of things with a marvellously minute vision
and a wonderful accuracy, but he is barren of the in-
sight, the faculty divine, which reads their inner soul
and significance. He passed the most impressionable
years of his life in the most picturesque, the most
infinitely and pathetically interesting country in the
world, and all — or very nearly all — that he has to tell
us of it is the ' gup ' of Simla, the chatter of Mrs.
Hauksbee's tea-table, the slang and blasphemy of the
barrack canteen. They are reproduced with admirable
truth and cleverness, they are used, as is all Mr,
Kipling's material, with the quickest appreciation of

MR. RUDTARD KIPLING. i6i

character and dramatic effect, but they are not all that
a man of genius would have found to write about in
India. Mr. Kipling seems to me to be completely
lacking in one, and only very slightly endowed with
another, of two qualities indispensable to the greatest
kind of writer — the sense of revolt and the sense of
pity. He is a born Tory, he looks upon the world
and says, ' It is good, for the strong triumph therein.'
A phrase which I once applied to Thomas Carlyle is
even more closely applicable to Mr. Kipling — he
habitually writes, and apparently thinks, as if the name
of Christ had never been spoken on this earth. Though
personally an artist of exquisite powers, he has no
enthusiasm for art. An improvement in the gear of an
ironclad or a Maxim gun would give him infinitely
greater pleasure than the discovery of a masterpiece by
Raffaelle or Phidias. If the Greece of antiquity, the
Greece which in a few brief years amassed for humanity
the richest and purest legacy of high thought and
matchless art it has inherited, could be revived, it
would hardly interest him for a moment ; the smallness
of its colonies would fill him with contempt for the
clique of clever duffers who wasted their time in talking
about the properties of the soul and their muscle in
chipping marble. In a word he is, as his admirers are
never tired of proclaiming, essentially ' English.' And
to be ' English,' in the sense in which the Jingo uses
the word, is to be vulgar, brutal, and morally retro-
grade; qualities which are perfectly compatible with a
high degree of merely literary excellence, as well as

M

i62 MR. RUDTJRD KIPLING.

with the practice of all the heathen virtues. But there
are other qualities in the English character than brag
and earth-hunger, else were it worse for England in the
Day of Judgment than for Sodom and Gomorrah, and
I prefer the writers who dwell upon them. I would
rather wander about the lanes and fields of England
with the rustics of Wordsworth and Tennyson, or even
descend into the slums of London with Jo, or Covey,
or Liza of Lambeth, than sit in the shag-laden air of
the canteen and listen to the raucous cockneyisms of
Private Ortheris, for whom I have, nevertheless, a very
warm regard and respect, tempered by a strong distaste
or his vocabulary, and an even stronger sense of pity
for his dismally restricted moral outlook: —

Ah God ! the love I bear him for his brave heart and strong

hand —
Ah Christ, the hate that smites me for his stupid, dull conceit !

i63

French and English.

Paris of the Parisians. By J. F. Macdonald.
Life in Paris. By Richard Whiteing.

IT happened that, at the moment at which these
volumes were put into my hands, I had just been
reading another book very like them in fundamental
character, though as different from them in tone, and
in the emotional condition it produces in the reader, as
one book can easily be from another — Thackeray's
' Paris Sketch-Book.' Neither Mr. Macdonald nor
Mr. Whiteing, I am sure, nor any reasonable admirer
of their work, would expect any self-respecting critic
to compare the three books, or — generally — their three
authors, to the disadvantage of the elder writer. The
' Paris Sketch-Book ' is not in any sense a great book,
but it is all the same the work of a really great man ;
of a man dowered to a high degree with those gifts of
power and insight whose sum-total we call genius.
And yet, while carefully guarding myself from the
suspicion of claiming for Mr. Macdonald or Mr.
Whiteing any such lofty place in the intellectual
hierarchy as must be allowed to Thackeray, I do claim
for ' Paris of the Parisians ' and ' Life in Paris ' that

i64 FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

they are books better worth reading and remembering —
in their essence and spirit — than is the ' Paris Sketch-
Book.' If, by the mouths of its scholars, travellers, or
men of genius, one nation must needs criticise another,
it is surely better that the criticism should be hopeful
and kindly rather than despairing and vindictive ; that
the verdict should be coloured by the prejudice of
affection rather than by a parti-pris of contempt ; that
the result left upon the mind of the reader should be
one of kinship and kindness. Thackeray probably
knew his Paris as well as either of her later critics ; he
certainly knew, appreciated, and loved much that was
best worth knowing and loving in French art and
French literature, and — being an honest man under all
his hide-bound Anglicism of thought and feeling — paid
frequent and eloquent testimony to French genius.
He could even draw two such wholly French and yet
wholly admirable and lovable characters as Paul de
Florae and his mother, Leonore de Florae, Colonel
Newcome's first love. And yet, the net impression left
upon the mind of the reader who recalls the sum-total
of Thackeray's utterances on France and the French is
one of hatred and contempt. He could see and
proclaim the superior inborn tact and politeness which
make of every decent French proletaire something
strongly resembling a gentleman ; the gaiety and native
s avoir vivre which make of a popular holiday in France
a spectacle truly delightful to witness, so different from
the beery brutality of an English mob ; the innate
and universal feeling for beauty which has made

FRENCH AND ENGLISH. 165

* Frenchman ' almost a synonym for * artist.' But the
eminently British cast of his mind debarred him from
taking a further step, from asking whether, quality for
quality, one race was not worth the other ; if the
distinguishing French aptitudes of taste and touch did
not offer a sufficient excuse for the lack — the alleged
lack, that is — of the sterner virtues which our national
vanity, quite as exigeante as that of the French, makes
us claim as peculiarly our national property. Bourgeois
of the bourgeois, with all his genius ; a true son of the
land that gave him birth and a finished product of the
social class among which his days were spent ; such a
question certainly never occurred to him. Sneering, as
he often did, at English self-sufficiency and insularity,
he did more to foster them than any other writer I can
remember. The ' Paris Sketch-Book ' dates from one
of the poorest and barrenest periods of our intellectual
history. Our literature of that epoch, except for the
work of one or two writers whose happily constituted
genius could move at ease in the stodgy bourgeois
atmosphere of the time, was at a very low ebb. Our
art was worthless, conventional, almost dead, only
stirring faintly where it was touched by the enthusiasm
of the despised and decried Pre-Raphaelites. And just
at that very moment, Paris was alive with genius,
humming with new and powerful voices. No doubt
much of its art was hectic and unhealthy ; much of its
thought was wild, profane, and half insane ; many of
the new voices raved and jibbered very questionable
doctrine. But Paris was at least intellectually alive,

1 66 FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

and, if one needs must judge between two such
unsightly objects, a patient tossing in a fever-fit is
surely preferable to a corpse. At a time when,
literally, the English theatre had ceased to exist,
Thackeray could find nothing to say of the dramas of
Hugo and Dumas than that they were ' profoundly
immoral and absurd.' ' After,' says he, ' after having
seen most of the grand dramas which have been pro-
duced at Paris for the last half-dozen years, and
thinking over all that one has seen — the fictitious
murders, rapes, adulteries, and other crimes, by which
one has been interested and excited — a man may take
leave to be heartily ashamed of the manner in which
he has spent his time, and of the hideous kind of
mental intoxication in which he has permitted himself
to indulge.' Surely, 'Hernani' and 'Marion Delorme'
— even ' Caligula ' and ' La Tour de Nesle ' — were
better than the abject rubbish — and even that mostly
stolen from the despised French — which at that time
occupied the stages of our theatres in London. Else-
where, in another of his books, Thackeray spoke of
the English as ' the stupidest nation in Europe,'
and there are moments when, despite all his power
of moving our laughter and our tears, all his un-
questioned wit, genius, and scholarship, one is tempted
to retort — ' True, and you yourself one of the stupidest
people belonging to it.'

It is not, fortunately, in any such mood of snobbish
superciliousness that Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Whiteing
have approached their task. The keynote of ' Paris

FRENCH AND ENGLISH. 167

of the Parisians ' is struck in the preface, from which the
following rather lengthy quotation is taken : —

I have not looked down upon the capital of France from the
top of the Eiffel Tower ; nor yet from the terrace of the Sacre
Coeur j nor yet from the balcony among the chimeres of Notre
Dame; nor yet from Napoleon^s column on the Place Vendome;
nor yet from the Revolution's monument that celebrates the
taking of the Bastille. No doubt from these exalted places the
town affords an amazing spectacle. Domes rise in the distance^
and steeples. Chimneys smoke ; clouds hurry. Up there the
spectator has not only a fine bird's-eye view of beautiful Paris ;
he has a good throne for historical recollections, for philo-
sophical reveries, for the development of political and scientific
theories also. But for the student of to-day's life, whose in-
terest turns less to monuments than to men, there is this
drawback — seen from this point of view the inhabitants of
Paris look pigmies. Far below him they pass and repass :
the bourgeois, the bohemian, the boulevardier, all small, all
restless, all active, all so remote that one is not to be dis-
tinguished from the other. Coming down from his tower, the
philosopher may explore Paris from the tombs of St. Denis to
the crypts of the Pantheon, from the Galleries of the Louvre
to the shops in the Rue de Rivoli, from the Opera and Odeon
to the Moulin Rouge and sham horrors of the cabarets of
Montmartre, — leaving Paris from the Gare du Nord, he may
look back at the white city under the blue sky with mingled
regret and satisfaction — regret for the instructive days he has
spent vt^ithin her, satisfaction in that he knows her every stone ;
and yet, when some hours later in mid-channel the coasts of
France grew dim, he may leave behind him an undiscovered
Paris — not monumental Paris, not political Paris, not Baedeker's
Paris, not profligate Paris, not fashionable cosmopolitan Paris
of the Right Bank, not Bohemian Anglo-American Paris of
the left Bank, but Paris as she knows herself — Paris of the
Parisians.

1 68 FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

Not only conscientious foreign explorers ignore this Paris ;
cosmopolitan residents are often unacquainted with her true
characteristics. Both are given to keeping to themselves ; and
Parisians must be approached and not waited for ; and soothed
at first, and even flattered a little. And then all overtures
must be made in French — for Parisians abhor foreign tongues.
And all reflections on London Sundays, London fogs, London
smoke, however exaggerated, must be accepted mildly — for
Parisians cannot bear to be contradicted. And all reference
to Mddle. Larive's famous song, ' Voila les Englisch,' must be
welcomed with a smile — for Parisians hate the over-sensitive.
Finally, it would be fatal to resent the compassion bestowed
upon you because you happen not to have been born in Paris.
Humour them so far, and they will bid you not be cast down.
Thank them for their compassion, and they, in their turn, will
boast that after awhile they will make a perfect Parisian of you,
and inspire you with so profound a love for them and their
surroundings that you will weep as you take your homeward
ticket at the Gare du Nord ; and tremble in the train; and
sigh not only on account of sickness in the Channel; and
groan in the Strand; and recall the past by your fireside; and
go to bed melancholy with memories ; and dream fondly until
dawn of Paris, Paris, Paris. All this they prophesy amiably ;
then taking you at once in hand, introduce you to their friends.
These also receive you pleasantly, and soon you are surprised
at the number of genial Parisians with whom you have shaken
hands, and to whom you have said, 'Charme, monsieur, de faire
votre connaissance.' Time, moreover, does not dispel the im-
pression made upon you by their amiability and kindness. You
are ' mon cher ' soon, then ' mon vieux.' You share their
secrets before long. You must take their arm. You are as
good as naturalised. You are ' one of them.' You are ' chez
vous,' 'chez eux,'

Optimism is a virtue — of sorts — no doubt, but there
are moments when cheerfulness takes on something of

FRENCH AND ENGLISH. ibc)

an aspect of mockery. As will be seen later on, I have
another opinion with which to compare Mr. Macdonald's
regarding the mutual ' abordability ' of the French and
English, but it is interesting to remark in passing the
means by which, according to Mr. Macdonald, the
conciliation must be secured. That most hopelessly
unmalleable of living creatures, the average Englishman,
is to change his entire bearing — indeed, his entire nature.
Loathing flattery, even when addressed to himself, he
is to become the adroitest of flatterers. And, though
generally incapable even of learning by rote the few
sentences of guide-book dialogue necessary to carry
him through a foreign country, he is to do his flattery
in French !

Virtues of which the spectator has no notion are to be
found in Paris of the Parisians. And the Parisian does not
conceal them through mauvaise honte. Love of Nature, love
of children, both absorb him ; how regularly does he hurry into
the country to sprawl on the grass, lunch by a lake, stare at
the sunset, the stars, and the moon ; how frequently he admires
the view from his window, the Jardin du Luxembourg, and the
Seine; how invariably he spoils his ^wi^ or another's ^W5^, any-
body's gosse., infant, boy, or girl ! He will go to the Luxembourg
merely to watch them. He likes to see them dig, and make
queer patterns in the dust. He loves to hear them laugh at
Guignol, and is officiously careful to see that they are securely
strapped on to the wooden horses. He does not mind their
hoops, and does not care a jot if their balls knock his best hat
off. He walks proudly behind Jeanne and Edouard, on the
day of their first Communion, all over Paris ; laughing as
Jeanne lifts her snow-white skirt and when Edouard, eetat.
10, salutes a friend ; and he worships Jeanne, and thinks that
there is no better son in the world than Edouard, and he will

1 70 FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

tell you so candidly and with earnestness over and over again.
* Ma fille Jeanne,' ' Men fils Edouard,' ' Mes deux gosses^' is
his favourite way of introducing the joy of his heart and the
light of his home. And then he knows how to live amiably,
and how to amuse himself pleasantly, and how to put poorer
people at their ease, as on fete days. He will go to a State
theatre on 14th July (when the performance is free), and
joke with the crowd that waits patiently before its doors, and
never push, and never complain, and never think of elbowing
his way forward at the critical moment to get in. He will
admire the fireworks and illuminations after ; and dance at
street corners without ever uttering a word that is rude or
making a gesture that is rough.

There is a kindlier — and therefore a better — note
here than is audible in Thackeray's strident pro-
clamation of British superiority. The whole book is
informed with this pleasant, neighbourly warm-
heartedness, a sense of sunlight ; exterior and internal,
pervades its pages, and leaves, after their perusal,
something of that nameless charm which follows a day
spent among the quaint buildings of the old Paris and
on the leafy boulevards of the new. The worst of it
is that such feelings are so evanescent, and give the
reader but little encouragement to share the hope of a
kindly critic, quoted by Mr. Macdonald in his preface,
that they may have some tendency to ' counteract the
wrong-headed reports of French and English antipathies
by which two sympathetic neighbour-peoples are being
estranged and exasperated ' A man who, with all the
will in the world to share such hopes, keeps his eyes
open and does his best to look at things as they really

\

FRENCH AND ENGLISH. 17 1

are, cannot but entertain some grave doubts on the
subject. There is a passage in Thackeray's ' Sketch-
Book ' which is worth remarking in this connexion, a
passage of a sentiment diametrically opposed to that
expressed in the passage from Mr. Macdonald's preface,
cited above. ' After two, four, ten years spent in Paris/
says Thackeray : —

Intimacy there is none ; we see but the outsides of the
people. Year by year we live in France, and grow grey, and
see no more. We play ecarte with M. de Trefle every night ;
but what know we of the heart of the man — of the inward
ways, thoughts, and customs of Trefle ? If we have good legs,
and love the amusement, we dance with Countess Flicflac,
Tuesdays and Thursdays, ever since the Peace, and how far
are we advanced in acquaintance with her since we first twirled
her round a room .'' We known her velvet gown, and her
diamonds (about three-fourths of them are sham, by the way) ;
we know her smiles and her simpers and her rouge — but no
more ; she may turn into a kitchen wench at twelve on Thurs-
day night, for aught we know ; her voiture^ a pumpkin ; and
her gens^ so many rats ; but the real, rougeless, intirne Flicflac
we know not. This privilege is granted to no Englishman :
we may understand the French language as well as M. de
Levizac, but can never penetrate into Flicflac's confidence ;
our ways are not her ways ; our manners of thinking not hers ;
when we say a good thing, in the course of a night, we are
wondrous lucky and pleased ; Flicflac will trill you off fifty in
ten minuter, and wonder at the betise of the Briton, who has
never a word to say. We are married, and have fourteen
children, and would just as soon make love to the Pope of
Rome as to aught but our own wife. If you do not make love
to Flicflac, from the day after her marriage to the day she
reaches sixty, she thinks you a fool. We won't play at ecarte
with Trefle on Sunday nights ; and are seen walking, about

172 FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

one o'clock (accompanied by about fourteen red-haired children
with fourteen gleaming prayer-books), away from the church.
' Grand Dieu ! ' cries Trefle, ' is that man mad ? He won't
play at cards on a Sunday ; he goes to church on a Sunday :
he has fourteen children ! '

There is a profound truth in these words of
Thackeray's — truth put with admirable humour and —
of course — with a touch of bitterness, and the all-
pervading sense that the right of the matter is with us.
(Note, in passing, the touch about Madame la Comtesse's
diamonds). I am, for my own part, grimly incredulous
of the capacity of the most charming book in the world
to draw together, in any appreciable degree, two sets of
people so profoundly, so fundamentally, so chemically
different as the French and the English. In the first
place, it is only an infinitesimal fraction of either
population — or of any population, for the matter of
that — that reads at all ; and again, only a small fraction
of that fraction is sufficiently intelligent to want to
know anything about a foreign people. Every race is
different from — every race is antagonistic to — every
other race. Ask the ordinary British citizen his opinion
of some of the types of character to which Mr. Mac-
donald would introduce him in this charming book ; of
' Bibi la Puree,' the friend, valet, secretary and odd-job-
man of the lamented Paul Verlaine, of whom Mr.
Macdonald gives a truly charming character sketch.
Ask him what he thinks of the ' Daughters of Murger,'
who live in unhallowed union with the poets, actors,
and painters of La Rive Gauche. Such people have no

FRENCH AND ENGLISH. 173

place at all in his scheme ot things. An English girl
either marries or remains celibate, or — there are other
alternatives, no doubt, but decent people — English
people — know nothing about them, do not recognise
the existence of any half-way house between marriage
and celibacy. Neither *le parler' nor ' la morale Mont-
martroise ' is taught in British boarding-schools, and
British people, with the puritan paste in their composi-
tions— how should they ever mix freely with the jolly
pagans who speak and practise such abominations ^ In
the day of the making of men and nations, the pastes
no doubt got mixed a little here and there. Here and
there one finds an Englishman capable of understanding
and loving that radically un-English monstrosity, a
Frenchman. Here and there — but more rarely, I can-
not but think — you may find a Frenchman capable of
returning the compliment. But these are mere
exceptions, proving the rule. Thackeray's ' Sketch-
Book,' Francis Child's poem, in which he speaks of
Mr. Macdonald's beloved Paris as

The bug-bright thing that know nor love nor pity,
Flaunting her bare shame to the summer sky —

these are the true expressions of the average English-
man's feelings towards France and the French.
Tennyson wished the narrow sea which separates us was
* a whole Atlantic broad ' It is broad enough to
prevent the hearts or thoughts of the two races from
ever mingling : —

L'onde met entre nous, toujours, tout son sinople.

174 FRENCH JND ENGLISH.

A friend of mine, who belongs to that — to me —
exasperatingly mysterious class, the cultured ultra-Jingo,
remarked to me recently that his idea of a perfect
scheme of things would be one in which the entire globe
would have fallen into the hands of the English race,
specimens of other peoples being preserved under glass
frames in a museum of curiosities. That such an ideal
should recommend itself to the ordinary Englishman
might, perhaps, be no great matter for wonder, but
that a man acquainted with the artistic and literary pro-
ducts of many ages and divers countries should hold it
is nothing less than amazing. It shows, as I have before
remarked in this connexion, a lack of the real
philosophic and critical spirit which, in comparing one
race with another, is careful to weigh the qualities of
one against those of its competitor, and reluctant to
decide rashly as to which of the two sets of qualities
may be most valuable to the race at large. The
distinction between the English and the French ideals
of social virtue is broadly marked. We — ' la race
forte,' as Hugo called us — go for strength ; the great
French preoccupation is grace, beauty, the decorative
element, and it seems to me that the Englishman who
proclaims his contempt of the Gallic influence is very
much on a par with the man of any race who thinks to
establish a reputation for ' manliness ' by despising
women. Art, as Mr. Whiteing shows in more than
one eloquent passage, is in Paris pursued as strenuously
and in as hard-and-fast a scientific spirit — so far as the
selection of its practitioners is concerned — as any other

FRENCH AND ENGLISH. 175

branch of human effort. Any boy who shows a taste
for drawing can command the finest tuition in the
world at an almost nominal price, and as he leaves the
ranks of the mere 'prentice hands, a series of eliminatory
processes which long use has rendered infallible weeds
out the failures and classifies the successes. The pride
of the great artists in their profession, their whole-
hearted desire to continue the highest traditions of
artistic culture, are truly splendid. Gerome, old and
sick, sits up in bed to examine and criticise the sketches
of a boy he has never seen, and who is not even his
compatriot. Meissonier, plunged in abysses of debt in
spite of a princely professional income, yet finds time —
and no small space of time either — to perform similar
offices. ' The note of the race,' says Mr. Whiteing,
' is devotion to art. Art is almost the only real priest-
hood left in France. ... It is regarded as a working
substitute for religion.' That, of course, it can never
quite be, but it is at least a better substitute for lost
faith than land-grabbing and money-grubbing ; the
substitutes in which too many men of British race have
put their trust. When one thinks of what French art
means to the higher life of the world one can pardon,
if not altogether endorse, the magnificent passage of
rant in ' L'Annee Terrible ' : —

Sans Paris, Tavenir naitra reptil et nu.

It is rather a strange circumstance that, with the
liking — and the capacity — for shedding new light upon
familiar problems possessed by Mr. Whiteing, he

176 FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

should have given us no theory by which we might

be helped to understand what is, to many men of other

races, the amazingly paradoxical view of woman taken

by the average Frenchman. Centuries ago, an English

traveller remarked that ' more than any other people

do they despise, and flatter, their womenfolk,' a true

statement, but one of which he afforded no explanation.

Stranger still is the aspect in which the individual

Frenchman views the sex. France is pre-eminently

the home of the family sentiment. George Du Mau-

rier's jingle,

I sing tra la la !

And I love my mamma !

expresses two predominant phases of French character.
And the Frenchman's mamma is worth loving. Hear
Mr. Whiteing in her praise : —

The wives and womankind generally of the labouring class
are a great force on the side of the domestic virtues. The
well-brought-up Frenchwoman of whatever class is order,
method, thrift, and industry personified. If a representative
goddess of these virtues were wanted, there she is ready to
hand. Within her degree she is, as I have said, neat from top
to toe, well shod, trim in her attire. Within the same limit of
opportunity she is notoriously a good cook. She will work
early and late. Her children rise up and call her blessed as
they put on the shirts and stockings which she has mended
overnight. Strong drink is a vice almost unknown to her
experience in so far as it is one affecting her own sex. So far
as I know, there is no analogue in France to the British
matron of the working-class who tipples at the public-house
bar. It is an insistent fancy of mine that the Frenchwoman,
both for good and ill, is the stronger of the sex combination for

FRENCH AND ENGLISH. 177

the whole race. Like the person in the nursery rhyme, when
she is bad she is horrid, because of the will and the mental
power that she puts into her aberrations. But when she is
good — and she is generally so (for in all life, thank Heaven !
the averages are usually on the right side) — she is a treasure.
She keeps the poor man's home straight.

Her daughter grows up like her, with the most elementary
notions as to rights and pleasures, with the sternest notions as
to duties. The home is, of course, the best nursery of these
virtues, and I could wish that the girl had never to pass its
bounds for the indiscriminate companionship of the factory.
She has been taught to look for a sort of maternal initiative in
all things, and she is apt to feel like a corporal's file without its
corporal when she stands alone. She is not so well fortified as
the English — above all, as the American — girl by pride in her
self-reliance. She is best where she best likes to be — at home.
After all, the best of factories is only the second-best of this
ministrant sex, as the best of creches^ where one day, I
suppose, the cradles will be rocked by steam-power, is only
second-best for her baby brother or sister. Both are very
much better than nothing ; no more can be said. In France,
as in England, the workman's ideal is to keep the woman at
home. These in their sum are the great steadying influences
that correct the boulevard and the wine-shop for the French
working-man. They also correct the platforms of the
revolution.

Every word of this is true, and every word of it is
finding an echo at the moment I write in millions of
French hearts. The one sentiment which brings down
the house in a French theatre, a more certain hit even
than ' I'Armee 'or * le drapeau ' is the love of mother
and son. The mere national coldness which marks
such relations on our side of the Channel shocks even
a depraved Frenchman, to whom nothing on earth is

N

178 FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

sacred but ' la mere ' — the wonderful mixture of play-
mate, chum, and tutelary goddess. At a Sunday night
performance of ' Hamlet ' at the Fran^ais, I have heard
the packed mass of proletaires and piou-pious in the pit
groan with actual angry anguish at Hamlet's denun-
ciation of Gertrude's wickedness. ^ Elle a epouse
I'assassin de son pere, mais, voyons, c'est toujours sa
mere, n'est-ce-pas .^ ' How is it that this affection, so
deep, so sincere, so exquisitely and beautifully tender,
does so little to purify the average Frenchman's idea of
woman as a sex ^ His notion would seem to be that
his own mother is a saint and an angel, while yours, or
mine, is most probably — something quite the reverse.
And the worst of it for the national reputation is that
the French literature of these latter days — the imagina-
tive literature of the novelist and dramatist, dwells so
persistently on the wrong half of this paradoxical
summing up of the moral status of woman. In most
French novels and plays there is a Nana or a Madame
Marneffe, a Seraphine or a Marguerite Gautier ; it is
only far more rarely that the reader who knows his
France only by the medium of the printed page can
make the acquaintance of a Eugenie Grandet, a Pauline
Quenu, or a Madame Hulot. When the few French-
men who read any language but their own, or are in
the slightest degree aware of foreign criticism of their
social life, complain — as they so frequently do — of the
vulgar English idea that France is exclusively populated
by people of worse than doubtful morals, they leave
out of sight the obvious circumstance that a nation can

FRENCH AND ENGLISH. 179

be judged, by the vast majority of the population of a
foreign country, only by documentary evidence. And
the documentary evidence from the pens of Frenchmen
regarding their sisters' morals is frightfully damnatory.
The false wife, the kept woman, and the cocotte, are
the three dominant types of female character in the
modern French novel and on the modern French stage ;
and that large, and — most unfortunately — increasing
department of French ' literature ' which, in Mr.
Whiteing's phrase, ' might make us think the very
Yahoos had learned to read,' intensifies a belief which
every man who has personally studied French society
knows to be a foul and cruel libel. ' Tu I'as voulu,
Georges Dandin ! ' — though why Georges, passionately
loving his mother, should so industriously blacken her
sex is a curious and puzzling question. I have put this
problem to more than one French friend, only to be
answered by the evasive lift of the shoulder with which
his nation dismisses a too thorny problem, and Mr.
Meredith's advice, ' Never pursue a Frenchman beyond
the shrug,' is one of the truest words ever written.
Universally adopted by Englishmen, it might be the
secret of a genuine and enduring ' entente cordiale '
between the two nations.

We arrive here, by the simple and natural process
of setting side by side the utterances of Thackeray and
Tennyson on the one hand, and of Messrs. Whiteing
and Macdonald on the other ; at a curious and interest-
ing little paradox, worthy, perhaps, of more than a mere
passing glance. Thackeray and Tennyson were two

i8o FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

of the most remarkable personalities produced by the
England of the nineteenth century. Neither Mr.
Whiteing nor Mr. Macdonald possesses such genius
as they could claim. Yet, in the gifts of understand-
ing and sympathising with the thoughts and feelings
of a race foreign to their own, which are surely among
the powers with which one might expect a great
novelist or a great poet to be most richly endowed
— both these great geniuses could well afford to go
to school to them. I can remember at this moment
only two great imaginative English writers of the Vic-
torian era whose utterances regarding France were un-
varying in sympathy and kindliness — Charles Dickens
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Dickens 'loved the
French,' as he loved all men, and never spoke of them,
as a nation, except with affection and admiration. Mrs.
Browning saw in France ' the Christ of Nations,' and in
the darkest hours of its history kept her eyes fixed on
the goal towards which it struggled, rather than on the
failures and humiliations with which its path was strewn
so thickly. She could see the edifice which France
toiled to build change, under some subtle and malign
influence, from a Palace of Liberty to ' a brothel or a
prison ; ' but her final word was one of hopeful prayer
— ' God save France ! ' Thackeray looked on at the
socio-political turmoil with the true British grin of
self-satisfied superiority ; suggested that ' Boz, or Theo-
dore Hook, would be a fitter historian for such a people
and their revolutions than Thomas Carlyle ; ' and asked
* if anything was real in France ' — if there was anything

FRENCH AND ENGLISH. i8i

to be found in the country but tinsel and humbug,
frothy declamation and stage rant. The justification —
if so it can be called — of Thackeray and Tennyson is
that they spoke for the vast majority of their country-
men. Mr. Whiteing and Mr. Macdonald speak only
for an infinitesimal minority, a minority so small that
it can never have the least power permanently to affect
the public mind.

l82

Zola's Lay Sermon.

Fecondite, par 6mile Zola.

7/ aimait la vie, il en montrait P effort incessant avec une tranquille
vaillance, ?nalgre tout le mal, tout Pecoeurement quelle pouvait contenir.
La vie avait beau paraitre affreuse, elle devait etre grande et bonne,
puisqu'on mettait a la vivre une volont'e si tenace, dans le but, sans doute,
de cette volont'e meme et du grand travail ignore qii'elle accomplissait .
Certes, il etait un savant, un clairvoyant, il ne croyait pas a une
humanite d^idylle vivant dans une nature de lait, il voyait au con-
traire les maux et les tares, les etalait, les fouillait, les cataloguait depuis
trente ans ; et sa passion de la vie, son admiration des forces de la vie
sujffisaient a lejeter dans une perpetuellejoie, d'ou setnblait couler naturelle-
ment son amour des autres, un attendrissement fraternel, une sympathie,
qu'on sentait sous sa rudesse danatomiste et sous Pimpersonnalit'e affectee
de se udes. — Le Docteur Pascal, p. 57-

Certes, il y a bien des elements pourris. Je ne les ai pas caches,
je les ai trap etales peut-etre. Mais vous ne m\ntendez guere, si vous
vous imaginez que je crois a Peffrondremerit final, parce que je fnontre
les plates et les lezardes. Je crois a la vie qui elimitie sans cesse les
corps nuisibles, qui refait de la chair pour boucher les blessures, qui
marche quand meme a la sante, au renouvelletnent continu, parmi les im-
pureth et la mart, — Ibid., p. 1 06.

THE noblest spectacle and the highest lesson this
mortal experience is capable of affording are
surely the spectacle offered and the lesson inculcated by
such lives as that of Emile Zola, a spectacle and a lesson
whose value to humanity may be quite independent of
the worth of any artistic product such lives may leave

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON. 183

behind them. For, merely regarding a man's work, there
are always, and always must be, infinite discrepancies of
opinion, and what, to one student, may be the very
milk and meat of intellectual life will be to others a
deadly poison, or a mere insipid mockery of honest
food. This is especially the case with the effort of the
innovator and the iconoclast, the bringer of new things,
the militant thinker who conducts his campaign in some
ancient domain of art or ethics, already the scene of
a hundred hard-stricken battles. The last lesson the
bulk of humanity will ever learn is that finality in any-
thing is impossible, and most impossible of all in the
realms of Art and Thought. A hundred systems have
had their day and ceased to be, but the establishment
of the last is always final in the belief of the generation
which has grown under its influence — the merely
approximate truth of its day is to it the eternal verity
which shall witness the extinction of the stars. And
so, the innovator is certain to have a hard time of it,
and the lives of men of genius — who after all are
merely men with the capacity of seeing the hitherto
undiscovered relationships of common things — are so
often what Carlyle declared them to be, lines in the
saddest chapter of human history, not excluding the
Newgate Calendar. There is that in the soul of man
which will move him to give skin for skin, yea, life
itself, for what he holds as truth, and that is the spirit
which informs the nobler half of what we call Conser-
vatism ; but there is that in the mind of man which
bitterly resents, as a personal insult, all unfamiliar

1 84 ZOLJ'S LAY SERMON.

teaching, and brands as a nuisance and a coxcomb the
bringer of new things. ' Who the devil are you ? ' is the
latter-day colloquial equivalent of the query hurled,
generation after generation, at the innovator. 'Who
made you our judge and our instructor.?' And there is,
of course, the chance, and more than a mere off-chance,
that the conservative may be right and the innovator
wrong. All apostles of new science are not Keplers,
all philanthropic reformers are not Clarksons, all artistic
revolutionaries are not Balzacs or Zolas. Where the
world is most cruel is not in the denial of the value of
a proffered gift, but in its failure to read the spirit in
which the gift is laid before it ; in the non-recognition
of the generosity and courage without which the gift,
whatever be its worth or worthlessness, would never
have been proffered at all.

Not on the vulgar mass

Called ' work,' must sentence pass —

Things done, which took the eye and had their price ;
O'er which from level stand
The low^ world laid its hand,

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice.

Sweat of blood must many a time have gone to the
doing of work whose contemplation left no human
soul the richer or the poorer by one grain — or even to
the making of nothing at all. One of the profoundest
of all human truths is that put by Browning into the
mouth of Rabbi Ben Ezra : —

Thoughts, hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON. 185

Fancies that broke through language and escaped ;
All, I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,

That I was worth to God —

But, after all, the wise man will do his best to be
content with such rough and partial justice as the
world — rather busy than brutal, rather indifferent than
inimical — can find time to mete out. He will turn
with especial gladness to the life-records of those
individuals of dominant power, whose thrones are set
enduringly upon the Alps of difficulty conquered by
resolute endeavour ; and will be less eager to criticise
the laws they fulminate than to recognise the splendid
courage and endurance by dint whereof they won their
right to a hearing. What, to-day, is the value of the
camel-load of ponderous polemics on which Samuel
Johnson relied as a passport to immortality ? But
when, so long as the history of his life remains, shall it
fail to be a cordial draught to all who read it, in its
record of long years of obscurity, privation, and physical
and mental anguish so bravely borne, of ignoble mill-
work so nobly done, of sordid difficulty so splendidly
overcome ; all to be crowned at last by the pathetic
irony of a brief term of honour and success, coming
when he was old and could not enjoy them, solitary,
and could not share them ?

In one important respect, Emile Zola has been more
fortunate than most pioneers of literary revolution.
Still in the full vigour of production, he has been a
recognised leader of European thought for something

1 86 ZOLA'S LAY SERMON.

like a quarter of a century ; so it can hardly be said of
him, as must be said of so many of his brother inno-
vators, that ' strength has been mournfully denied its
arena.' He had his early years of poverty and ob-
scurity, bitter enough, and he had for some time very
considerable difficulty in finding a rostrum from which
to preach his artistic doctrine ; but the years of his
apprenticeship were rather helpful than hindering to his
genius. They taught him many of the sterner facts of
life, and developed and strengthened the philosophical
scheme he has made it the business of his intellectual
maturity to teach to his generation. A struggle less
bitter, crowned by an earlier success, might have been
even injurious to his higher interests, by curtailing his
experience of the seamy side of life. To describe him
as a point-blank pessimist, or as a man whose mental
senses are so curiously adjusted that he is conscious
only of the shadows and stenches of existence, is an
exhibition of sheer critical stupidity, all the more
exasperating from its frequent repetition. Not that
that kind of critical ineptitude has ever mattered
much to him. No burly mariner, pacing the deck
in panoply of oilskin and sou'wester, could be more
placidly contemptuous of a passing shower than Zola
has been of the torrents of abuse poured on him by
his critical opponents. Nothing is more remarkable,
nothing more admirable, in his half-dozen bulky
volumes of polemics, from ' Mes Haines ' to 'La
Nouvelle Campagne,' than the good temper and sweet
reasonableness of their tone. The best-insulted man

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON. 187

in Europe, his only weapons of reprisal were logic and
irony — the last generally quite free from any taint of
personal bitterness. I know no critical utterances, either
analytic or synthetic, to be compared with his for
clarity of idea and directness of expression, for the
strange blending of red-heat of belief with studious
sobriety of language. They are eloquent of that settled
calm of conviction out of which alone great work can
ever come, the conviction that the message they convey
is one of vital and necessary truth, the conviction that
has no need to express itself in rant and froth ; but,
' strong without rage, without o'erflowing full,' moves
with the mild but indivertible force of a great river.

Dominant natures are, as a rule, homogeneous ; the
outcome of a strongly marked personality is generally of
a piece. It was characteristic of the man who undertook
the gigantic task of reforming the opinion of the entire
world that he should cast his effort in a mould as
gigantic as the thought which inspired it. Starving and
obscure, it never apparently occurred to Zola to put
forth his ideas in scattered and disconnected volumes,
each self-dependent, and each therefore with a fair
chance of being readily converted into the necessaries of
life. He did indeed write such books, but they were
merely hors d'ceuvres^ and their principal value to their
author was that they helped him to live while arranging
the plan and building the base of that Babylonian
literary edifice, 'Les Rougon-Macquart.' It was charac-
teristic, yet again, that when the unfaltering courage
and splendid level strength of temperament and genius

i88 ZOLA'S LAY SERMON.

of which that amazing series of volumes is the monu-
ment had won for its author wealth, power, and the
reluctant respect of his bitterest opponents, he should
fling all he had gained into the balance in the cause
of justice, and dare ruin for the sake of a wronged
man whose face he had never seen. It was characteristic
that, prosecuted, exiled, in danger of his very life, he
should calmly continue the manufacture of his daily
tale of ' copy.' It is characteristic that, the desperate
battle fought and won, at an age when most men
begin to ask of life some brief period of ease and
rest, he should settle with the same familiar sturdy
quiet to the writing of a last great message to his
generation and his race, the Four Gospels of Fecundity,
Labour, Justice, and Truth. Challengeable as a thinker,
by no means impeccable as an artist, but supreme as a
Man, he stands amid the group of splendid figures the
nineteenth century has added to the interminable frieze
of history, the unquestioned peer of the noblest and
the best.

The main thread of the narrative of ' Fecondite '
is extremely simple, and its ' moral ' as obvious as
that of a Biblical parable. Mathieu Froment, a
young man in the early twenties, has married a
penniless girl, Marianne, a distant cousin of his
employer, Alexandre Beauchene, the inheritor and
head of an important manufactory of agricultural
implements. The young couple, at the date at
which the story opens, have already four children,

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON. 189

and are in expectation of a fifth, Mathieu's actual
salary and future prospects are both of the most
modest, and his wild improvidence in thus handi-
capping himself at the very start of the race of life
is a theme of much contemptuous pleasantry on the
part of his cousin and employer, Beauchene, and of
his landlord, Seguin. Beauchene and Seguin are both
types of capital importance. Beauchene has one child,
a son, upon whom both he and his wife have founded
their entire hope. He is to be the future king of
commerce, to inherit and aggrandise the wealth and
position of his parents, neither of whom could conceive
a more harrowing disaster than the coming of a second
child to split his inheritance. Seguin is a nervous,
spineless dilettante, a fribble, a coward, and an egotist,
incessantly wailing over the inherent vulgarity of
existence; finding his only consolation in some far-off
epoch when humanity, recognising the ugliness and
sterility of life, shall cease to breed, and leave the
earth a mere wilderness of vegetation, peopled by
brutes. He is the proprietor of Chantebled, a vast
and sterile waste of stone, sand, and water; which
produces nothing but thorns, nettles, and a few
partridges. Mathieu, dwelling amid this desert in a
ruinous old shooting-box, grows himself a little dis-
quieted by the rapid increase of his family, and casts
about in his mind for some means of improving his
children's prospects. He conceives the idea of buying
a corner of the neglected domain, clearing it, and
trying his luck as a wheat farmer. The experiment.

190 ZOLA'S LAY SERMON.

begun on the most modest scale, succeeds, and year
by year Mathieu extends his labours, adding acre to
acre ; that fruitful vine, his wife, increasing their family
once in every two years, with the regularity of a
well-mounted automaton. Meanwhile, Beauchene and
Seguin are walking their respective roads. The first,
a man of gross nature, determined to limit his legi-
timate off-spring to the one adored child he already
possesses, satisfies his sensual appetites elsewhere than
at home, and wastes his time, his health, and his fortune
in a series of more and more disgraceful liaisons. His
cherished son dies, a year or two of renewed cohabi-
tation with his wife make it plain that they can hope
for no other offspring to replace him ; he goes back to
his vagabond amours, and sinks into the mud of
shameless promiscuity, leaving his business to fall
year by year into the hands of a son of Mathieu,
who has succeeded his father as head-draughtsman at
the factory, and finally dying, old, despised, ruined,
and alone. Seguin, dishonoured in the person of his
wife, an originally honest woman, whose better nature
has dry-rotted under the influence of his morbid and
cowardly pessimism, wastes the price of his estate in
all kinds of stupid fantasies. His daughter, her young
life blighted by the knowledge of her mother's in-
fidelity, buries herself in a convent ; his son becomes
an anchorite-soldier, ' with no wife but his sword.'
The once wealthy and prosperous family disappears
like a river that runs into the sand. Mathieu and
his swarming progeny triumph all along the line.

ZOLA'S LJy SERMON. 191

Chantebled, the desert which their robust courage
has made to blossom as the rose, is theirs. The
great factory, drawing wealth from every corner of
the earth, is theirs. ' Grace a la famille nombreuse,
a la poussee fatale du nombre, ils avaient fini par tout
envahir, par tout posseder. La fecondite etait la
souveraine, I'invincible conquerante, . . . Et ils etaient,
la main dans la main, devant leur oeuvre, tels que
d'admirables heros, glorieux d'avoir ete bons et forts,
d'avoir beaucoup enfante, beaucoup cree, donne au
monde beaucoup de joie, de sante, d'espoir, parmi
les eternelles luttes et les eternelles larmes.' A grand-
father at forty, a great-grandfather at sixty, a great-
great - grandfather at eighty, we take farewell of
Mathieu at ninety amid the clamorous worship of
his two hundred descendants, standing beside the
faithful partner of his seventy years of fruitful labour,
under the shadow of a giant oak he had planted as
a sapling on the day when his spade turned the first
sod of Chantebled. There is an unexpected guest
amid the crowd in the person of his grandson
Dominique, the son of Nicolas, a pioneer of the
Soudan, himself the father of a flourishing family,
looking hopefully forward to the day when his
children shall have repeated in Africa the miracle
the founder of their race has accomplished in France,
the metamorphosis of a desert into a garden. * Par-
dessus les mers, le lait avait coule du vieux sol de
France, jusqu'aux immensites de I'Afrique vierge, la
jeune et geante France de demain. Apres le Chantebled

192 ZOLA'S LA 7 SERMON

conquis sur un coin dedaigne du patrimoine national,
un autre Chantebled se taillait un royaume, au loin,
dans les vastes etendues desertes, que la vie avait
a feconder encore. Et c'etait I'exode, I'expansion
humaine par le monde, I'humanite en marche, a
I'infini.'

In the hands of most writers of fiction, perhaps of
any living writer but Zola, this strong and simple theme
would of itself have sufficed for the making of a novel
of full average length. But as is his habit in preaching
those tremendous ' lay-sermons ' by which he has won
his fame, he enforces his moral by the action of a vast
number of subsidiary types. His theme in ' Fecondite '
is the decadence of France as a European power by the
rapid failure of her population, that France is dying for
lack of Frenchmen. To the purely philosophical mind
that fact might present itself as one of merely local interest
— there is certainly little enough fear of humanity perish-
ing for lack of men. But Zola is a philosopher plus a
Frenchman, and an ultra-chauvinistic Frenchman at
that, which means that, in matters relating to the
motherland, he ceases to be a philosopher at all, or at
least ceases to be a philosopher of the dispassionate
school. To him, the slow suicide of France is a terrible
and atrocious thing ; the petty selfishness of the indi-
vidual who shirks the national responsibility of nurturing
the children who should be the labourers and soldiers
of to-morrow the vilest of crimes ; ' fece per viltate, il
gran rifiuto,' the most shameful of national epitaphs.

Mathieu, the apostle of Fecundity, finds himself, by

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON, 193

the hazards of life, plunged into the intimacy of a set of
people whose principal pre-occupations are the indul-
gence of the sexual passion and the suppression of the
natural results of its exercise. His fellow employe,
Morange, is a married man with one child, a daughter.
His wife, a beautiful, ambitious, and by no means un-
amiable woman, has concentrated the social ambitions
she can never hope personally to realise on the head of
little Reine. She and Morange pinch and starve and
contrive with the one object of accumulating for her a
dowry which will ensure her a husband of a higher
class than their own. The efforts of years of ambitious
self-sacrifice are suddenly blasted by the threatened
appearance of a second child. The foolish couple,
good people both, with no worse quality than a vicarious
ambition in their simple hearts, fly in their despair to
Madame Rouche, a discreet person whose amiable office
it is to render aid in such cases. An illicit operation
results in the poor woman's death ; a year or two later
Reine reaches the same sad bourne by a similar path,
and Morange is left to solitude, madness, and ultimate
suicide. Beauchene, Mathieu's cousin and employer,
has a liaison with a workgirl in his own factory. Very
unwillingly, the sensual egotist consents to support the
girl until the birth of her child, which passes through
the hands of I'Assistance Publique into the care of La
Couteau, an awful creature whose business is baby-
murder, and who lives in the village of Rougemont
amid a population of monsters in her own likeness.
Mathieu's nearest neighbours in the country are a

o

194 ZOLA'S LAY SERMON

young couple named Angelin, passionately fond of each
other, but resolute to have no children to disturb the
idyllic atmosphere of their lives. When at last they
wake to the desire of offspring, it is too late, and
Madame Angelin finds the best outlet she may for her
baffled maternal instinct in relieving the miseries of the
children of the poorest and most criminal quarters of
Paris, She is murdered for the sake of her bag of
small change by Alexandre, Beauchene's illegitimate
child, who has escaped the infantine holocaust of
Rougemont to develop into a bandit and assassin.
' Au hasard d'une minute de luxure, la semence humaine
avait jailli, I'enfant avait pousse sans qu'on y songeat,
ne au petit bonheur, lache ensuite sur le trottoir, sans
surveillance, sans soutien. II s'y pourrissait, il y deve-
nait un terrible ferment de decomposition sociale ....
faisant le fumier ou germait le crime.' Beauchene's
sister, the Baroness Serafine, is a Society Messalina, a
high-class Nana. In order to indulge her one appetite
she undergoes, at the hands of the famous surgeon,
Gaude, an operation which, if Zola is to be trusted —
and Zola, on matters of fact, may be trusted blindfold
— is growing appallingly fashionable among all classes
of French life. Gaude's practice is enormous ; his
hospital patients number two and three thousands per
annum, his private patients reach twice those numbers.
It is reckoned that in fifteen years, in Paris alone,
from thirty to forty thousands of such operations have
taken place, and that in the whole of France half a
million of women have passed under the bistouri of

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON. 195

Gaude and his fellow practitioners. * En dix ans, le
couteau des chatreurs de femmes nous a fait plus de
mal que les balles prussiennes pendant I'annee terrible.'
In the case of Serafine, a highly-strung, ill-balanced
woman, already the victim of an unhealthy nevrose,
the result of the operation is a shock to the entire
system which induces an appallingly rapid physical and
mental degeneration, culminating in insanity.

The student of Zola's former work may guess with
what a ruthless hand this indictment of contem-
porary France is drawn, with what completeness
and amplitude of knowledge the sordid details of this
terrible series of pictures of moral degradation and
physical misery are filled in. The result on the mind
of the reader of many passages of ' Fecondite ' is truly
appalling. They chill the blood and grip the heart as
no wealth of merely invented horrors could do, it is
their absolute and unescapable sense of truth and reality
which gives them their terrible effect. And, such is
the perfection of Zola's art, it is not those scenes of
misery which he makes pass actually before the eyes
of the reader which create the most dreadfld impres-
sion, or which dwell most persistently on the mind.
It is that horrible village-metropolis of infanticide,
Rougemont, which he never sees at all, which to him
is personified in the figure of La Couteau, ' meneuse de
nourrices ' and baby-farmer, who comes and goes every
fortnight between Rougemont and Paris ; bringing with
her on every visit a handful of female harpies to de-
vastate the nurseries of Paris, and returning to her

196 ZOLA'S LAY SERMON.

lair, like some hideous ogress, laden with children, of
whom we know that ninety per cent, are doomed to a
death of miserable squalor : a licensed assassin, a char-
tered pestilence in petticoats.

But if, in this amazing study of contemporary life,
the shadows are painted with a heavy hand, there are
spots of brightness too, broad patches of clear colour.
In Norine Moineaud, Beauchene's abandoned mistress,
Zola has added yet another to the portrait gallery of
feminine figures of which little Jeanne, of ' Une Page
d' Amour,' and Pauline, of * La Joie de Vivre,' are
among the most delightful examples. There is little
enough either of the saint or the heroine about poor
Norine when we first make her acquaintance, and for a
long time after. She is just the typical child of her
class, the Parisian gamine, with the added accident of
physical beauty, hungry for coarse pleasures and cheap
bedizenment. When Beauchene's child is born she
parts with it with hardly a pang, though she knows to
what fate it is in all likelihood condemned. The father
whose roof she has disgraced has set his face implacably
against her ; her one refiage and possible profession is
the boulevard, and she takes to the ' vie du trottoir '
quite naturally, like a duck to water ; living through its
alternations of hunger and repletion, cheap splendour
and squalid misery, with the careless, stupid courage of
the class to whose level she has sunk. A second child
comes to her, and would go the way of the first, but for
the simple cunning of Mathieu, who, with a super-
Machiavellian wealth of diplomatic manoeuvring.

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON. 197

manages to persuade her to suckle it. And lo ! in the
heart of this poor, battered Aspasia of the streets the
divine flame of motherhood is kindled by the mere
touch of the baby-lips upon her breast ; the foulness of
the old life falls from her like a discarded garment. In
the very prime of her vulgar beauty she turns her back
upon its market, and devotes herself to a life of mono-
tonous and wretchedly-paid labour that her child may
have an honest woman for his mother. She has a sister,
Cecile, who at the age of sixteen has passed under the
hands of the Surgeon Gaude, and whose life is one long
despair, because she was born for motherhood, and now
can never know either its joys or pains. Norine and
Cecile, the repentant Magdalen and the maiden doomed
to perpetual sterility, come together over the cradle of
the child of shame. They earn a few sous a day by
making card-board boxes, and the little one has two
mothers, ' Maman Norine * and ' Maman Cecile,' who so
emulate each other in coddling and spoiling him that
he neither knows nor cares to ask which is indeed his
mother in the flesh. In this and in similar incidents
which so beautifijlly diversify the else abiding terror of
this wonderful book there is no note of that cheap and
shabby sentimentality by which even so great a writer
as Charles Dickens sometimes reduced pathos to
nauseous ineptitude. Norine and Cecile do not become
wingless angels, nor does their adored bantling develop
a vocabulary reconciling the verbiage of Dr. Johnson
with the philosophy of Mr. Martin Tupper. They
remain poor, common people, with the outlook and the

198 ZOLA'S LAY SERMON.

locutions of their kind ; a trio of Parisian cockneys,
vulgar among the vulgar in dress and speech and aspect,
differentiated only from the crowd about them by the
pathos of their story, the divine gentleness and strength
of their mutual affection, Zola accepts and proclaims
life as it is with a kind of splendid shamelessness. It is
that very quality which makes his strength. Naked
humanity, stripped of the tinselled trappings irj which
long generations of sentimental liars have bedecked it, is
enough for him. It will seem strange, perhaps
strangest of all to those who have most closely studied
his work, that he, of all men, should preach the doctrine
of fecundity, who, of all men, has most pitilessiv dwelt
upon the miseries and horrors of human existence.
But the apparent paradox vanishes before a little
thought ; this book, this tremendous and triumphant
sermon on the text, ' Increase and multiply,' is a flood
of vivid light upon the true inwardness of Zola's creed.
Life is terrible, awful, tragic beyond all power of words
to speak; but it is the Law, the outcome of the im-
mutable and eternal not-ourselves, the Foundation and
Principle, the force before which the unending
generations of our race are but as dust before the wind.
All questioning of its end or object are vanity ; love it
or hate it as you will, you cannot escape its laws. And,
if it has its terrors and squalors, it has too its beauties,
its fleeting moments of divine insight, its brief glimpses
of a diviner hope beyond itself

Such is the theme, and such the lesson, of this
remarkable book ; the largest in bulk, and assuredly not

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON.

[99

the least admirable in literary quality, in grasp of fact,
in knowledge of life, among the two score of masterly
volumes we owe to the indefatigable genius of Emile
Zola, It would be impossible, in many times the space
at my command, to do justice to its virtues. Like all
that has proceeded from the pen of its great author, it
is written with a calm and level strength, an unfailing
dexterity of artistic execution. Probably no living
writer but Zola could have conceived a theme at once
so large and so simple ; perhaps no other writer, having
conceived it, would have had the audacity to attempt to
realise the conception : quite certainly there is no verbal
artist working in Europe to-day who could have
carried so tremendous an undertaking to so triumphant
a close. The action of the book covers seventy years,
at every turn of its story new figures appear upon the
scene, new interests are evolved, new fields of know-
ledge and observation are opened. It has a largeness, a
fulness, an abundance, like those of life itself. Laughter
and tears and terror, joy and despair and indignation
and pity, jostle each other in its pages as in the infinite
phantasmagoria of existence. No book I have ever read
has revived so acutely in my mind the eternal questions
of the limits and the aims of the artist in fiction ; the
problem of how far a novelist, who writes for all the
world, is justified in reproducing the actualities of life.
It contains passages over which the strongest critical
stomachs might sicken ; episodes which evoke irre-
pressible shudders of repulsion, and, torn from their
context, would seem to be the work of some fiendish

200 ZOLA'S LAY SERMON.

satyr, some enemy of his kind moved by the horrible
ambition of de Sade, ' to leave the world a little worse
than he had found it.' And yet, the book closed, the
work left to speak in its entirety, those passages and
episodes which, at the moment of reading, seem burned
into the brain as by the action of a mordant acid, are
forgotten, effaced, are at most but like a discordant
murmur troubling the exultant lilt of a song of joy and
triumph. It is long since Zola's unswerving truth to
the baser depths of human nature has ceased to evoke
the foolish cry of ' pornograph ' and ' filth-lover ' from
even the most stupid. It was amazing to any person
of intelligence that the cry should ever have been raised
at all, for he has never written a book which was not
instinct with the beauty of love and pity ; never painted
' a corner of the human Inferno without at least its one
angelic figure, testifying against its sordid background
like the lily in the mouth of Tartarus. * J'ai fait ceuvre
de justice et de verite,' was his reply to his accusers,
and the world had learned to believe him even before
that day when he stood over the figure of Dreyfus like
Voltaire above Jean Calas, and flung his hard-earned
fortune and popularity into the scale of justice. We
of his own generation stand too near to see the full
human value of that act of splendid audacity, but even
to us it is as a light whereby we may judge of Zola as
a man, an episode which illuminates and justifies his
life and work. We may be told that in ' Fecondite,'
as in his former books, he has introduced matter which
cannot, of its nature, be used as material for a work of

ZOLA'S LAT SERMON. 201

art ; and that a book built of such matter must be
necessarily a hybrid, an unclassable literary eccentricity.
It may be so, but I can only remember that the same
thing has been said of nearly every former work of
Zola's, and that he has never yet written a book which
has not moved me to a passionate admiration, nor of
which the ultimate outcome has not been a larger under-
standing, a tenderer pity, of the struggling and suffering
mass of which I am a unit. I do not know whether
' Fecondite ' is bad art, or good art, or a negation of all
art. I know only that for a few hours I have laughed
and lamented, suffered, triumphed, and despaired with
the shadows who people its pages; and that, since I
happen to be called upon to speak my word respecting
it, I am glad and proud of the privilege of publicly
thanking a man of lofty genius for a great and living
book.

202

A Lyric Love.

[The Browning Letters.]

O, lyric Love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire !

/^^F all the Love-stories ever told or sung, or ever
^^ acted in the mimic world of the stage, or in
tragic or happy reality, surely none is more strange,
more remarkable, more infinitely beautiful than that of
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. A middle-
aged woman, who has never been physically attractive,
and who has been worn by years of sickness and soul-
solitude to a mere shadow of the self she should have
been, lies awaiting with a serene patience and placid
courage the hour of her release. The bitterness of
death has long since passed, for in her simple faith it
can rob her of nothing that she cares to keep, and her
answer to his final summons will place her again beside
the mother and the brother whose loss was only the
greatest calamity of a pathetically unhappy experience.
Love — never more than the dimmest of dreams to her,
has ceased to be even a dream — if all the men in the
world could pass in procession by her sofa which one
of them all would choose her ? Fame, she has won —

A LYRIC LOVE. 203

if it be ' fame ' to read her name in the literary reviews
and to receive scattered letters which tell her that, out of
the twelve hundred million hearts beating on the
earth's surface, she has, for a moment, fluttered a
score by a graceful fancy or a sigh eloquent of pain.
She has a father, whom she loves, and who — as she
thinks — loves her ; and brothers and sisters, and books,
and dreams, and her life ebbs slowly like a sluggish
river already arrived within hearing of the ocean which
waits to absorb it. The world has narrowed to the
limits of her chamber ; humanity is represented by her
family circle and by plump, cheery, sensible John
Kenyon, who loved her, and will share her immortality
because she loved him in return. And suddenly, with
a suddenness no epithet or simile can describe, the
narrow chamber is changed to a royal reception-room,
the sick-bed to a throne, the poor crippled woman to a
Queen — the Queen of but one subject, true — but what
a subject !

The most fervent lover of either or both of the
great poets who penned these letters could only rise
from their perusal with increased admiration and
greater afi^ection for their writers. So far from there
being any line which one could wish to blot, there are
few lines in the entire eleven hundred pages of these
' Letters * of which the destruction or suppression
would not have been a loss to humanity at large.
We have been told, ad nauseam^ that they ' were not
meant for publication,' At the moment of writing
they were not so meant, and it is precisely that

204 A LYRIC LOVE.

circumstance which gives them their greatest beauty
and significance. Compare them with the letters of
other celebrities — of Byron, for instance, who never
wrote the most casual line without a shadowy printer's
devil at his elbow. But when, towards the close of his
life, Browning gave the letters to his son with the
simple injunction, 'do with them as you please,' his
desire for their publication was evident ; and what more
testimony to its advisability is needed.? More than
fifty years have passed since they were written. Both
the hearts whose passionate beats they chronicle are
still in death. There is no more ' indelicacy ' or lack
of reverence, now, in giving these letters to the world,
full as they are of the writer's once most jealously
hidden thoughts, fancies, and aspirations, than if the
hands which wrote them had been dust

To the last digit, ages ere our birth.

This aspect of the case, curiously enough, is discussed,
and — to my thinking — finally disposed of, in a letter
of Mrs. Browning's, printed in the first volume of
this collection.

I, for my part, value letters as the most vital part of
biography, and for any rational human being to put his foot
on the traditions of his kind in this particular class, does seem
to me as wonderful as possible. ... I can read book after
book of such reading — or could. And if her (Miss Martineau's)
principle were carried out there would be an end ! Death
would be deader from henceforth. Also it is a wrong selfish
principle and unworthy of her whole life and profession,
because we should all be ready to say that if the secrets of our

A LTRIC LOVE. 205

daily lives and inner souls may instruct other surviving souls,
let them be open to men hereafter, even as they are to God
now. Dust to dust, and soul-secrets to humanity — there are
natural heirs to all these things. Not that I do not intimately
understand the shrinking back from the idea of publicity on
any terms — not that I w^ould not myself destroy papers of mine
which were sacred to me for personal reasons — but then
I never would call this natural weakness virtue — nor would I,
as a teacher of the public, announce it and attempt to justify it
as an example to other minds and acts, I hope.

Look what is inside of this letter — look ! I gathered it
for you to-day when I was walking in the Regent's Park. Are
you surprised? Arabel and Flush and I were in the carriage —
and the sun was shining with that green light through the
trees, as if he carried down with him the very essence of the
leaves to the ground . . . and I wished so much to walk
through a half-open gate along a shaded path, that we stopped
the carriage and got out and walked, and I put both my feet
on the grass . . . which was the strangest feeling ! . . . and
gathered this laburnum for you. It hung quite high up on the
tree, the little blossom did, and Arabel said that certainly I
could not reach it — but you see !

It is not a child of seven who writes this, but a
woman of thirty-seven, and a woman, moreover, whose
name comes to the lips of all who number the great
poets of England.

It was like a bit of that Dreamland which is your especial
dominion — and I felt joyful enough for the moment to look
round for you, as for the cause. It seemed illogical not to see
you close by. And you were not far off, after all, if thoughts
count as bringers near. Dearest, we shall walk together under
the trees some day !

2o6 A LTRIC LOVE.

' That Dreamland which is your especial dominion.'
What a world of pathos is in that little phrase, read in
the light shed upon it by a full knowledge of Elizabeth
Barrett's life ! The main features of that life are
familiar to every student of her work. They form a
story which, like all other stories, however wonderful,
or tragic, or comic, or pitiful, has grown commonplace
and uninteresting merely by force of being so well
known. It is the overmastering charm and beauty of
this book that it vivifies the dull and faded picture
we all know so well ; that in place of a pale, faded
daguerreotype of a young lady lying on a cushioned
sofa, reading Greek, writing verses, and fondling a
lapdog, it gives us the living, breathing reproduction,
by her own hand, of the heart and soul of one who was
at once a great poet and a most noble human creature.
The poems, both of Mrs. Browning and of her husband,
are full of the spirit of love, much of the finest work
of each is that which deals with individual passion ;
but nothing in the utterances they addressed to the
ear of the world compares in force, in beauty, in true
sacredness, with the story of their love for each other,
as it is revealed in these letters.

Do you remember that incident in Thackeray of
one of a party of visitors to Bicetre giving a poor
epileptic creature in the hospital ' a cornet, or " screw "
of snuff,' and of the awful, unendurable transport of
affection and gratitude the gift provoked from its
recipient ? The earlier letters of Elizabeth Barrett to
Robert Browning give me some such tightness of the

A LTRIC LOVE. 207

throat and compression of the heart as that spectacle
produced in Thackeray. She seems in danger of
withering in the sudden glory that has shone about
her, Hke that mortal maiden to whom, in the Greek
legend, Zeus revealed himself. When the first be-
wildering shock has passed, she can speak of nothing
but her own unworthiness.

What could I speak that would not be unjust to you ?
Your life ! if you gave it to me and I put my whole heart into
it ; what should I put but anxiety, and more sadness than you
were born to ? What could I give you which it would not be
ungenerous to give ?

This thought grew to be a positive obsession, and
more than one of her letters to Browning is, in effect,
as solemn an appeal to him to leave and forget her, as
is expressed in the fifth of the ' Sonnets from the
Portuguese.*

I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,

As once Electra her sepulchral urn,

And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn

The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see

What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,

And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn

Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn

Could tread them out to darkness utterly

It might be well perhaps. But if instead

Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow

The grey dust up, . . . those laurels on thine head,

O my beloved, will not shield thee so,

That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred

The hair beneath. Stand farther ofFthcn ! go.'

2o8 A LYRIC LOVE.

This note recurs constantly, even after she had
learned to accept the at first unbelievable miracle as a
solid and abiding reality : —

Why did you love me, my beloved, v/hen you might have
chosen from the most perfect of all women, and each would
have loved you with the perfectest of her nature ? That is
my riddle in this world. I can understand everything else — I
was never stopped for the meaning of sorrow upon sorrow . . .
but that you should love me I do not understand, and I think
that I never shall.

And again : —

I had done living, I thought, when you came and sought
me out I and why, and to what end ? . . . . Perhaps just that

I might pray for you— which were a sufficient end It

is something to me between dream and miracle, all of it — as if
some dream of my earliest, brightest dreaming-time had been
lying through these dark years to steep in the sunshine, return-
ing to me in a double light. Can it be, I say to myself, that
you feel for me so ? can it be meant for me ? . . . , Your
love has been to me like God's own love, which makes the
receivers of it kneelers.

Here, again, is a most characteristic passage, full of
subtler meanings than those — pathetic enough as they
are — which lie open upon its surface.

What you say of society draws me on to many comparative
thoughts of your life and mine. You seem to have drunken of
the cup of life full, with the sun shining on it. I have lived
only inwardly, or with sorrow for a strong emotion. Before
this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are
few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen
more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am
scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country.

A LYRIC LOVE. 209

had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry,
and my experience in reveries, . . . And so time passed and
passed, and afterwards when my illness came and I seemed to
stand at the edge of the world with all done, and no prospect
(as appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one
room again ; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitter-
ness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me time
and room to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I
was about to leave — that I had seen no Human nature, that
my brothers and sisters of the earth were * names ' to me, that
I had beheld no great mountain or river ; nothing, in fact. I
was as a man dying who had not read Shakespeare, and it was
too late ! do you understand ? And do you also know what a
disadvantage this ignorance is to my art ? Why, if I live on
and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive
that I labour under signal disadvantages — that I am, in a
manner, as a blind poet.

There is a truly painful significance in those words —
* I was as a man dying who had not read Shakespeare '
— they mean so much. They mean that Elizabeth
Barrett was so far removed from the human sympathies
and human activities which filled the lives of happier
women that she could not even draw from such
sympathies and activities a symbol for her loneliness and
impotence, but must needs take one from the only
world she knew, that of books and thought.

I lived with shadows for my company
Instead of men and women.

To the last day of her life, she felt and mourned the
thinness of her actual active experience, and in her
earlier poems the grief, the sense of loss, the ' aching

p

210 A LYRIC LOVE.

void ' it occasioned, find frequent place. There is a
tear, as well as a smile, in the quaint exordium to
* Hector in the Garden ' : —

Nine years old ! The first of any
Seem the happiest years that come ;
Yet when I was nine, I said
No such word ! I thought instead
That the Greeks had used as many
In besieging Ilium.

' If my poetry is worth anything in any eye,' she
wrote to Browning in one of her earliest letters, ' it is
the flower of me. I have lived most and been most
happy in it, and so it has all my colours ; the rest of
me is but a root, fit for the ground and the dark.'

She had no need of the constant reminders of the
critics of her later books of the artistic debt she owed
to her husband. In the ' Sonnets ' she told him —

What I do,
And what I dream, include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes.

And her letters are full of similar confessions — or
proclamations, as she would have preferred to call them.
' Whatever faculty I have is included in your faculty,
and with a great rim all round it besides ! '

That, in return for this soul -filling affection,
Browning truly and passionately loved his wife, is
proved by the mere fact of his having chosen her out
of ' the world of women ' in which, as she truly said, he
might have sought a helpmeet. If — as could hardly

A LYRIC LOVE. 211

fail to be the case — he was conscious of his superiority
to her, both as a thinker and a poet, neither that know-
ledge nor her almost idolatrous proclamation of his
ascendancy had the least power to diminish the loving
reverence he felt for her. His letters are full of
eloquent recognition of the purity, sweetness, and high
moral dignity which marked her character. It seems
as if, at moments, he found it as great a marvel that
such a woman should love him as she found it that he
should love her. ' How you rise above yourself, while
I get no nearer where you were first of all ! ' he writes
to her afi:er weeks of intimate correspondence. ' But so
it should be ! So may it be ever ! ' They met in an
encounter of gorgeous compliment, like a giant and a
fairy, each admiring and coveting in the other some
special gifi: of strength or grace. 'Oh, my love,' he
writes to her,

Why, what is it you think to do, or become ' afterward,'
that you may fail in and so disappoint me ? . . . . For, sweet,
why wish, why think to alter ever by a line, change by a shade,
turn better if that were possible, and so only rise the higher
above me, yet further from instead of nearer to my heart ?
What I expect, what I build my future on, am quite, quite
prepared to * risk ' everything for — is that one belief that you
will not alter, will just remain as you are — meaning by you,
the love in you, the qualities I have known (for you will stop
me if I do not stop myself) that I have evidence of in every
letter, in every word, every look. Keeping these, if it be
God's will that the body passes — what is that ? Write no new
letters, speak no new words, look no new looks — only tell me,
years hence, that the present is alive, that what was once, still
is — and I am, must needs be, blessed as ever ! You speak of

212 A LYRIC LOVE.

my feeling as if it were a pure speculation — as if, because I see
somewhat in you, I make a calculation that there must be more
to see somewhere or other — where bdellium is found, the
onyx-stone may be looked for in the mystic land of the four
rivers ! And perhaps .... oh, poor human nature ! —
perhaps I do think at times on what may be to find ! But
what is that to you ? I offer for the bdellium — the other may
be found or not found. . . . What I see glitter on the ground,
that will suffice to make me rich as — rich as —

It must for ever remain a moot point whether —
merely as a thinker or as a verbal artist — Elizabeth
Barrett gained or lost by her long and intimate asso-
ciation with Robert Browning. Merely as a woman,
merely as a human creature, it is beyond doubt that she
gained enormously. It is no exaggeration or misstate-
ment to say that the last fifteen years of her mortal life
were a wedding gift made to her by her husband.
His ardent love, his reverent admiration, the interest
and meaning he imported into her hitherto cramped
and colourless existence, were to her as a potent wine,
as a transfusion of red blood. But for Browning his
wife would never have written * Aurora Leigh,' or
' Casa Guidi Windows ' — she would not have lived to
write them. But, that indubitable and else all-impor-
tant fact once gratefully recognised, it must be allowed
that his artistic influence was not an unmitigated good.
What she wrote of his faculty ' including ' hers was true.
If she was the greatest woman poet the world has seen,
he was the greatest English poet since Shakespeare,
And she had in excess the feminine vice of imitativeness,
as she herself confessed in one of her letters. ' You

A LYRIC LOVE. 213

are " masculine " to the height — and I, as a woman, have
studied some of your gestures of language and inton-
ation wistfully, as a thing beyond me far ! and the
more admirable for being beyond.' She had fallen
under his artistic influence long before she had ever seen
his face, and her letters are full of hinted and inferred
quotations from his earlier poems — phrases, words,
gleams of thought and idea, which showed that ' Pippa
Passes ' and ' Paracelsus ' had been read and re-read,
pondered over, assimilated so completely that they had
passed into the very blood and tissue of her mind.
Imitation of anybody, however great, is an artistic vice,
but imitation of such writers as Browning and Carlyle,
writers whose fervency of thought and vigour of
expression make their very defects pass for virtues, is
disastrous. Mrs. Browning confessed to a constitu-
tional carelessness of mere form, and to something like
a contempt of that sculpturesque ' finish ' which has — -
most happily to my thinking — been among the most
strenuously sought objects of most of the great English
poets ; and that carelessness and that contempt were
marked characteristics of her chosen model. Person-
ally, I am no adherent of the ' praise-at-any-price '
school of criticism, and all my admiration of Browning
and Mrs. Browning will never reconcile me to the
verbal form in which they were content to clothe some
of their noblest thought. Royal ideas should be royally
dressed. I can recognise the intellectual Ulysses under
the rags of a scarecrow, but I prefer to see him in his
befitting garniture of robe and crown. Cacophanous

214 A LTRIC LOVE.

concatenation of amazing adjective, staggering scansion,
and tympanum-torturing tintinnabulation of recalcitrant
rhyme are as easy, if one lays oneself out to excel in
them, as apt alliteration, and a good deal less pleasing.
And I believe, also, that both of these great poets
unawares exemplified the artistic doctrine they denied.
The writings of both are thickly scarred with faults of
form and expression, but their best work, that which
reveals the highest and purest thought, and by which
they will be ultimately judged and finally classified
among the poets of the world, is also that in which
their mere mannerisms and wilful eccentricities are
least remarkable.

215

Miss Marie Corelli.

The Master-Christian. By Marie Corelli.

UPON what precise plane of artistic achievement,
in relation to Miss Marie Corelli's other books

»

* The Master-Christian ' should be placed, is a question
which I must leave to critics with a wider knowledge
of her work than I can boast. Except for a perfunc-
tory skimming of the pages of ' The Sorrows of Satan '
and ' Barabbas ' at the moments of their publication, I
know no more of her literary achievement than I have
learned by hearing her books discussed in general
society, or from occasional notices in the critical Press.
Criticism has, I am told, been unkind and unjust to
Miss Corelli, and her contempt for its professors has
been tolerably well advertised. Quite unbiassed by
the common sentiments of the lady and her critics one
for another, I have read ' The Master-Christian ' with
the object of giving an honest opinion of its merits
for whatever that opinion may be worth. And in view
of the enormous and ever-growing popularity Miss
Corelli's work enjoys with a vast section of that
curiously heterogeneous mass, the English reading
public, I can only hope that * The Master-Christian '
does not represent its author at her best. For, judged
on its own intrinsic merits — the one and only fashion

21 6 MISS MARIE CORE ILL

in which any work of art should be judged — it seems
to me to be a quite surprisingly bad book. Its one
good quality is a sort of wild and undisciplined
strength — a strength which, had Miss Corelli been
endowed with a very moderate modicum of the
faculties of self-criticism and self-correction, might
have clarified into genuine literary power. Miss
Corelli reminds her reader of those unfortunate
athletes who have fallen victims to the vice of over-
training and have become ' muscle-bound,' with the
result that it costs them as severe an effort to lift a
glass to their lips as to raise a three-hundred-pound
dumb-bell. To vary the simile, she is as the pythoness
of old, who could not speak except in a scream, and
with a vast expenditure of froth. ' The Master-
Christian ' is one prolonged and strident shriek from
its first page to its last. Its most ordinary incident is
recounted with the same wild and whirling rush of
verbiage as its most melodramatic. Everybody in the
book is an abnormality on his or her particular lines —
abnormally good, or wicked, or gifted; and they all
express their different idiosyncrasies at abnormal length
and with abnormal self-conscious satisfaction. Miss
Corelli's emotional palette is set only with the purest
and most glaring primary tints ; she seems to have
neither use for, nor knowledge of, the quiet greys and
browns which round and reconcile the more brilliant
colours of the social panorama. Among the figures
of this book we have Cardinal Felix Bonpre, a monster
of goodness ; Varillo, the artist, a monster of vanity

MISS MARIE COREL LI 217

and jealousy ; Angela Sovrani, a monster of genius ;
Gherardi and Moretti, monsters of priestly craft ; the
Marquis Fontenelle and Miraudin, the actor, monsters
of sensuality ; and the ' marvellous boy ' Manuel, a
monster of a (literally) supernatural sort, of whom
more anon. Each of these people poses in his own
little circle of limelight, and never for a moment quits
the conventional scowl or leer by which his distin-
guishing peculiarity is impressed upon the reader.
Miss Corelli would seem to have taken Ouida for her
model. There is the same sense of theatrical unreality
in the work of both. The same incommunicable
odour of sawdust and orane;e-peel which surrounds
our memories of Astley's Theatre hangs about the
pages of their books ; the same solemnity in the perpe-
tration of literary absurdities, the same monumental
unhumorousness are common to both. This general
resemblance is perhaps heightened in the pages of ' The
Master-Christian ' by the circumstance that its scene
is laid for the most part in Italy, a country which
Ouida has pre-empted almost as strictly as Mr. Kipling
has appropriated India. Miss Corelli's manner of
reminding her reader of the foreign atmosphere he is
supposed to breathe consists of the simple means of
interlarding the conversation she puts into the mouths
of her characters with such recondite fragments of the
Tuscan tongue as ' Veramente ! ' ' Che, che,' ' mia
dolcezza,' ' ebben,' and the like. She has also, by the
way, one or two French locutions of a peculiar kind —
* Chocolat fondant, garantie tres pure,' and ' Tu vas te

2i8 MISS MARIE CORELLI.

crever sur terre avant je te quitte,' but the quaintest oF
her merely verbal blunders is attributed to the philan-
thropist and orator, Aubrey Leigh, who tells an
audience of some thousands of people that he has
' seen the consummation of many godless marriages.'
Ouida in her own gifted person has never done
anything better than that.

One of the chief faults of ' The Master-Christian *
is the straggling and indeterminate character of its
construction. Only two of the scores of people with
whose sayings and doings the book concerns itself are
at all continuously in evidence before the reader ; the
Cardinal, Felix Bonpre, and the boy he adopts as his
travelling companion, Manuel, an otherwise nameless
waif whom he finds at midnight on the steps of the
Cathedral at Rouen ; and they are by no means the
most interesting personalities in the book. The
Cardinal, though introduced and accompanied by a
great flourish of trumpets as a living antithesis and
reproof to the faults and failings of the Church of
Rome and of its priesthood, does nothing to justify his
creator's constant panegyrics. He moves through
much of the action of the succession of disjointed
episodes with which the book is filled, and talks as
indefatigably as the rest of the people concerned, but
his effect on the course of the story is practically nil.
So, also, with his protege, the boy Manuel, whom
Miss Corelli has invested with a spurious interest by
presenting him as a re-incarnation of Christ. A critic
who frankly takes his stand in the ranks of Agnosticism,

MISS MARIE CORELLI. 219

and whose attitude towards Divine mysteries is far
nearer that of blank negation than of hope in their
reality, may perhaps be conscious of some incongruity
in venturing to reprove for profanity a writer like Miss
Corelli, who loudly, and I believe, with perfect sincerity,
proclaims herself not merely ethically, but dogmatically,
a Christian, But I cannot think that Miss Corelli is
doing good service for the faith she professes herself
so anxious to serve and to purify by what is, and must
inevitably be, a vulgarisation of the Divine figure of
Jesus. That Miss Corelli is not the first novelist who
has been guilty of such a blunder I am quite aware,
but the absolute failure which has attended all attempts
to reconstruct the character of Christ for purposes
of fiction might surely have acted as a deterrent.

The author of ' The Master-Christian ' gives suffi-
cient proof in that volume of a long and intimate
acquaintance with the New Testament, with copious
citations from which her book is thickly strewn ; so she
can scarcely plead ignorance of the plain and categori-
cally expressed warning that the second coming of
Christ will not be in any form of disguise, human or
otherwise, but in His full powers and terrors as the
Lord of heaven and earth. By what warrant — as a
Christian — does Miss Corelli, merely for her own
purpose as a story-teller, bring Him down in the form
of a lost and homeless tramp ? There is, surely, little
reverence in such a liberty. And it is, to me, amazing
that so clever a person as Miss Corelli should not be
able to see how grave a mistake, merely from the artistic

220 MISS MARIE CORELLL

point of view, she has made in this proceeding. Short
of assuming some such direct Divine inspiration as that
claimed by the Evangelists to whom we owe the
biography of Christ, how can she justify her assumption
of such a task as the presentation of such a personality
in action among the men and things of this world?
How is a writer — any merely human writer — to rise to
the height of such an argument ? What a serene, what
an ineffable confidence in his proper genius such
a writer must possess ! Did Miss Corelli ever study
the mere literary style of the utterances of Christ
— of the Lord's Prayer, of the Beatitudes, of the
story of the Prodigal, of the words regarding the little
children or the lilies of the field ? — utterances which,
setting apart the alleged divinity of their speaker, and
forgetting for the moment the divinity of their signi-
ficance, are, merely as human speech, flawlessly beautiful
in melody and unapproachable in the terseness and
pregnancy of their expression, exquisite as flowers and
tense as steel. Voltaire, Pascal, De Foe, or Ruskin
would have shrunk from the task of forging a pastiche
of such a style. Miss Corelli undertakes it with per-
fect readiness and perfect self-approval. ' Manuel '
accompanies Cardinal Bonpre to the Vatican, and
the following excerpts from his address to the Pope
will serve, perhaps, to show the reader the extent
of Miss Corelli's justification in presenting him as a
reincarnation of the Divine Socialist of Galilee : —

' What, do you not also believe ? ' asked Manuel, placing
one foot on the first step of the Pope's throne, and looking

MISS MARIE CORELLI. 221

him straightly in the face, ' Do you not even affirm that
God answers prayer ? Do you not pray ? Do you not
assert that you yourself are benefited and helped — nay, even
kept alive by the prayers of the faithful ? Then why should
you doubt that Cardinal Bonpre has, by his prayer, rescued
one life — the life of a little child ? Is not your Church
built up for prayer ? Do you not command it ? Do you
not even insist upon the " vain repetitions " which Christ
forbade r Do you not summon the people to pray in
public ? — though Christ bade all who truly sought to follow
Him to pray in secret ? And amid all the false prayers,
the unthinking, selfish petitions, the blasphemous demands
for curses and confusion to fall upon enemies and contra-
dictors, the cowardly cryings for pardon from sinners who
do not repent that are sent up to the throne of the Most
High — is it marvellous that one prayer, pure of all self and
soph'stry, ascending to God, simply to ask for the life of a
child, should be heard and granted ? '

• • •

Like a shrunken white mummy set in a gilded sarcophagus,
the representative of St. Peter huddled himself together,
reflections of the daylight on the crimson hangings around
him casting occasional gleams of crimson athwart his bony
hands and cadaverous features. ...

' Faith must surely be weaker in these days than in the
days of Christ ! ' continued Manuel. ' The disciples were not
always wise or brave ; but they believed in the power of
their Master ! You — with so many centuries of prayer
behind you — will not say as John did — " Master, we saw one
casting out devils in Thy name, and he followeth not us ! "
Because this miracle is unexpected and exceptional, do you
say of your good Cardinal, " He followeth not us ? "
Remember how Christ answered — ** P orbid him not, for
there is no man which shall do a miracle in My name that
can speak evil of Me!"'

222 MISS MARIE COREL LI.

Still the same silence reigned. A shaft of sunli^iht falling
through the high oriel window, touched the boy's hair with
a Pentecostal flame of glory.

' You sent for me,' he went on, ' and I have come !
They say I must be taught. Will you teach me ? I would
know many things ! Tell me for one, why are you here,
shut away from the cities, and the people t Should you not
be among them ? Why do you stay here all alone ? You
must be very unhappy !'....

' To be here all alone ! ' w^ent on Manuel, ' and a whole
world outside waiting to comforted ! To have vast wealth
lying about you unused — with millions and millions of poor,
starving, struggling, dying creatures, near at hand, cursing
the God whom they have never been taught to know or to
bless ! To be safely sheltered while others are in danger !
To know that even kings and emperors are trembling on their
thrones because of the evil days that are drawing near in
punishment for evil deeds ! — to feel the great pulsating ache
of the world's heart beating through every hour of time,
and never to stretch forth a hand of consolation ! Surely
this must make you very sad ? Will you not come out
with me ? '

With a strong effort the Pope raised himself and looked
into the pleading Angel-face. . . .

'Come out with you!' he said, in a hoarse, faint whisper,
come out with you ! '

' Yes ! — Come out with me ! ' repeated Manuel, his accents
vibrating with a strange compelling sweetness, 'come out and
see the poor lying at the great gates of St. Peter's — the lame,
the halt, the blind — come and heal them by a touch, a prayer !
You can, you must, you shall heal them ! — if you will ! Pour
money into the thin hands of the starving ! — come with me into
the miserable places of the world — come and give comfort !
Come freely into the courts of kings, and see how the brows
ache under the crowns ! — how the hearts break beneath the
folds of velvet and ermine ! Why stand in the way of happiness,

MISS MARIE CORELLI. 223

or deny even emperors peace when they crave it ? Your
mission is to comfort, not to condemn ! You need no throne !
You vv^ant no kingdom ! — no settled place — no temporal power !
Enough for you to work and live as the poorest of all Christ's
ministers — without pomp, without ostentation or public cere-
monial, but simply clothed in pure holiness ! So shall God
love you more ! So shall you pass unscathed through the thick
of battle, and command Brotherhood in the place of Murder !
Go out and welcome Progress ! — take Science by the hand ! —
encourage Intellect ! — for all these things are of God, and are
God's gifts divine ! Live as Christ lived, teaching the people
personally and openly ; — loving them, pitying them, sharing their
joys and sorrows, blessing their little children ! Deny yourself
to no man ; — and make of this cold temple in which you now
dwell self-imprisoned a home and refuge for the friendless and
the poor ! Come out with me ! '

Miss Corelli treats us to eight pages of this eloquence
— ' Manuel,' in this one interview, speaking, I should
fancy, several times as many words as are recorded as
having been spoken by his Divine prototype in the
entire course of His sojourn upon earth. And he is
obviously quite capable of going on, and, like the
occupant of the ancient tripod alluded to by Mr.
Montagu Tigg, ' prophesying to a perfectly unlimited
extent,' but that the Pope faints — as well he might, poor
old gentleman ! — and the Cardinal and his prot^g^ 'go
out ' of the Vatican unaccompanied by his Holiness.
This scene inevitably brings to mind another book,
whose purport and intent are one with those of ' The
Master-Christian ' — Zola's ' Rome,' and, once again, the
comparison is hardly to Miss Corelli's advantage. Her
denunciation passes away in noise and froth ; the cold,

224 MISS MARIE CORELLI.

calm, intimate analysis of Zola is biting to-day like a
mordant acid into the very fabric of the Vatican. Miss
Corelli's sketch of Leo XIII, seems only a pale and
inefficient replica of the august and pathetic figure we
owe to the genius of the great Frenchman.

' The Master-Christian ' has two main themes, the
defections and imperfections of the Catholic clergy, and
— a matter regarding which Miss Corelli never seems
tired of holding forth — the hatred and dread which are
— according to Miss Corelli — inevitably kindled in the
masculine bosom by any proof of feminine artistic
genius. Such knowledge as I possess of the intellectual
history of the world leaves me quite in the dark as to
the evidence on which Miss Corelli accuses the male
half of humanity of a brutal and cowardly hatred of
every woman who rises an inch above her sisters in
intellectual attainment, I do not remember that George
Sand or Rosa Bonheur or Elizabeth Barrett Browning
suffered any very virulent persecution on account of
their sex ; nor, at the present day, do I believe in the
existence of one single critic who ' slates ' work simply
because it is the product of a female hand. Miss
Braddon, Mrs. Lynn Lynton, Mrs. Steel, Lady Butler,
Miss Clara Montalba — have any of these gifted ladies
any such tale of woe to pour into the public ear, and, if
so, why are they silent ^. Is Miss Terry hissed at the
Lyceum because she wears an unbifurcated garment }
Does the gallery ' guy ' Miss Julia Neilson at the
Globe .^ Is the femininity of Miss Marie Lloyd a
hissing and a reproach to the habitues of the Pavilion

MISS MARIE CORELLI. 225

and the Tivoli ? Miss Corelli, apparently, would have
us beheve something of the sort. In a score of passages
in ' The Master- Christian ' she accuses men — not merely
individuals, but men as a body — of hating, decrying,
and hounding down all women who prove their right
to intellectual consideration. The principal scene of
the book describes how Angela Sovrani, who has painted
a great allegorical picture, equalling, if not surpassing,
any creation we owe to the genius of Titian or Raffaelle,
is stabbed in the back with a dagger by a rival artist,
who is her affianced lover, simply because he could not
bear to see the powers of himself and his brother-crafts-
men put to shame by the genius of a woman ! Having
stabbed, and, as he thinks, killed Angela, Varillo
conceives the idea of claiming the picture as his own.
Here is the scene in Miss Corelli's own words : —

' Florian ! ' she said, ' Do you — you of all people in the
world — you to whom I have given all my love and confidence
— mean to suggest that my work is not my own ? '

He looked at her, smiling easily.

* Sweet Angela, not I! I know your genius — I worship
it ! See ! ' and with a light grace he dropped on one knee,
and snatching her hand, kissed it — then springing up again, he
said, ' You are a great creature, my Angela ! — the greatest
artist in the world, — if we can only make the world believe it ! '

Something in his voice, his manner, moved her to a vague
touch of dread. Earnestly she looked at him, — wondcringly,
and with a passionate reproach in her pure, true eyes. And
still he smiled, while the fiends of envy and malice made havoc
in his soul.

* My glorious Angela ! ' he said, * my bride ! my
beautiful one ! A veritable queen, to whom nations shall pay

Q

226 MISS MARIE CORELLI.

homage ! ' He threw one arm round her waist and drew her
somewhat roughly to him. ' You must not be vexed with me,
sweetheart ! — the world is a cruel world, and always doubts
great ability in woman. I only prepare you for what most
people will say. But I do not doubt ! — I know your power,
and triumph in it ! ' He paused a moment, breathing quickly,
— his eyes were fixed on the picture, — then he said, 'If I may
venture to criticise — there is a shadow there — there, at the^
left-hand side of the canvas — do you not see ? '

She disengaged herself from his clasp.

' Where ? ' she asked, in a voice from which all spirit and
hopefulness had fled.

' You are sad ? My Angela, have I discouraged you ?
Forgive me ! I do not find fault, — this is a mere nothing, —
you may not agree with me, — but does not that dark cloud
make somewhat too deep a line near the faded roses ? It may
be only an effect of this waning light, — but I do think that
line is heavy and might be improved. Be patient with me ! —
I only criticise to make perfection still more perfect !....'

'Just the slightest softening of the tone — the finishing
touch ! ' he murmured in caressing accents ; while to himself
he muttered — * It shall not be ! It shall never be ! ' Then
with a swift movement his hand snatched at the thing he
always carried concealed near his breast — a flash of pointed
steel glittered in the light, — and with one stealthy spring and
pitiless blow, he stabbed her full and furiously in the back as
she stood looking at the fault he had pretended to discover in
her picture. One choking cry escaped her lips, —

' Florian — you ! You — Florian ! ' Then reeling, she threw
up her arms and fell, face forward on the floor, insensible.

He stood above her, dagger in hand, — and studied the
weapon with a strange curiosity. It was crimson and wet with
blood. Then he stared at the picture. A faint horror began
to creep over him. The great Christ in the centre of the
painting seemed to live and move, and float towards him on
clouds of blinding glory.

MISS MARIE CORELLI. 227

Were Varillo presented as a type of insanity, this
incident might pass. But he is not so presented ; he
is offered to the reader as a type — and a common
type — of male humanity. Comment is needless —
he would be a curiously stupid reader who needed
to have the glaring absurdity of such a situation
dwelt upon, and the writer capable of presenting it is
surely quite beyond the power of argument or
remonstrance. The amiable Varillo, it may be stated,
comes to an end almost worthy of him. He finds
refiige in a Trappist monastery on the Campagna.
The circumstance that the monastery was an abode
of the Trappist Order gave me a momentary pleasure,
because one of the strictest rules of that Order is
the rule of silence, which seemed to promise at least a
brief surcease of the flood of gabble in which all
Miss Corelli's characters indulge. But she very
cleverly gets over the difficulty by the introduction of
Brother Ambrosio, who is mad, and, therefore allowed
to talk — a liberty of which he takes abundant
advantage. He overhears a plot laid by Varillo
and a Roman prelate, the object of which is further
mischief to Angela Sovrani, and, while the other
monks are digging their graves in the garden, he fires
the monastery and incinerates the wicked painter and
himself, and the curtain falls upon them, Varillo
shrieking for mercy and Brother Ambrosio, like a sort
of ecclesiastical Nero, playing the organ among the
flames.

228 MISS MARIE CORELLI.

I am as far from holding a brief for the personnel
of the Catholic clergy as I am from being the advocate
of any form of supernatural faith, but I would ask
such readers of ' The Master-Christian ' as may peruse
this article to take with a very large grain of salt one
very serious charge brought by Miss Corelli against a
body of men who, according to their lights, are for the
most part men of honest, blameless, and laborious
lives — the accusation of general unchastity. It is
true that that accusation is never definitely formulated.
It would have spoken more loudly for Miss Corelli's
honesty of purpose if she had had the sad courage
of her conviction, and had stated in plain terms a
belief which this book certainly inculcates, that the
priestly profession of celibacy is a mere cloak for
licentious living. With the exception of Cardinal
Bonpre — who is pretty obviously suspected by his
fellow ecclesiastics of being the father of the waif
Manuel — there is hardly a priestly figure in the
book who is not a more or less shameless profligate.
There is the Abbe Vergniaud, a professed atheist,
who wears clerical dress and performs clerical
functions, and who preaches a sermon in the church
of Notre Dame de Lorette in the course of which
he confesses to being the father of an illegitimate
son, which said son brings the sermon to an untimely
close by firing a pistol at him. There is Cazeau,
a priestly official of the Cathedral of Rouen, who
has seduced and deserted a peasant girl, so driving
her to insanity, and causing her to end her life as

MISS MARIE COREL LI. 229

his murderess and her own. There is Gherardi, a
prelate high in the entourage of the Pope himself,
who keeps a mistress in a villa at Frascati. One
is reminded of the mildly sarcastic remark of the
good Thomas of Sarranza regarding the merry stories
of the ' Decameron.' ' Excellent Italian, but a thought
monotonous. Monks and nuns were never all un-
chaste.' Satire, to be effective, must needs keep some
measure of verisimilitude. Miss Corelli may have
private and particular reasons for hating the Church
of Rome and its servants, or she may be merely
moved by an exaggeration of that distrust and fear
of the Catholic priesthood which actuate many other
worthy people ; but, be that as it may, she should
remember that too crude or violent a denunciation
of any thing or any person is certain to create a
revulsion of feeling in favour of the thing or person
denounced. France and Italy are not so far away
from England but that thousands of English men
and women know the minutias of their social life
quite as well as Miss Corelli can claim to do, and
only the most credulous of her readers will believe
that the priests of either country are as she has chosen
to paint them.

230

De Profundis.*

MY DEAR Arthur, — I have received a letter
from your father in which he tells me, with
the air of one imparting a discovery, that you have
strong literary leanings. I could have told him as
much within an hour of meeting you at the station
when I ran down to Beechcroft for a week's holiday in
the spring, though it was full seven years since I had
last seen you, a gauky lad, all knees and elbows, clad
in cricket-flannels, and beautifully innocent of any
leanings whatsoever except to the noisier and muddier
forms of field sports practised by your contemporaries.
I knew by the flush in your cheeks and the glitter in
your eyes as you shook hands with me on the platform
that I was to you no mere prosaic, commonplace uncle,
but that wonderful and worshipful personage — a writer
of books.

Your father encloses a bulky little bundle of manu-
script— principally verse — in your handwriting, and
asks for candid criticism thereon, telling me that you

* Being the views of a Literary man on the Literary Life,
addressed, in the form of an epistle, to a young man of promise who
contemplates joining the profession of Letters.

DE PRO FUND IS 231

liave consented to receive my judgment of your literary
powers, and to abide by it. Well, I will be candid
with you, and speak my mind. The dream you
'cherish, in common with Heaven knows how many
other youngsters of your years now scribbling over
the face of England, is true. You are a poet.
Through all sorts of little failures of technique ; in
-spite of occasional lapses into the bathetic ; despite the
imitative tendency invariably to be found in youthful
work, the divine spirit of Poesy shines out, radiant and
unmistakable. Have no fear that I am consciously
flattering you, or that I allow my critical sense to be
warped by relationship. I write those words with the
fiillest sense of their import, and I never wrote any
words less willingly since my fingers first held a pen.
I should have found far more comfort in my critical
task if your work were merely mediocre, flat prose cut
into jingling lengths, such as thousands of decent
tax-paying citizens have written before the necessities
of life drove them to the desk or the counter. But
you, God help you ! are a poet, and, like all such
unhappy beings, will walk your way and dree your
weird though all the uncles in Christendom should say
you nay. It is only a fool who wastes strength and
temper in fighting the inevitable, or I should have done
my best a year ago to turn you from the quicksand to
which you are drifting. It is some advantage merely
to foresee a catastrophe ; though it be impossible to
avert it, one may take measures to soften its effects,
and for the last six months the question of how to

232 DE PROFUNDI S.

mitigate the misfortune of your genius has been the
chief problem of my leisure hours.

' The misfortune of genius ? ' I think I hear you
repeat. I write the words in all sad sincerity, honestly
believing that in this year of grace, 1 900, high literary
capacity is as dire a curse as can well fall upon an
unmoneyed Englishman. Not in any sense you can
attach to the word ; not in any sense which you, in
your happy ignorance of the world of letters and of
that infinitely greater world of which it is so very
insignificant a part, can conceive. The phrase has
set your fancy wandering about the steep and thorny
paths of the great world-Calvary, strewn, from the
quagmire at its base to the Cross at its summit, with
the bones of the martyrs of genius — Chatterton,
Coleridge, and Rousseau, Shelley and Socrates, and
their myriad nameless fellow-sufFerers. And, with
the thought, you have no doubt worked yourself
into a condition of beautiful enthusiasm, and are
quite ready to take your place in that glorious
company at any price of martyrdom. You are still
in the honey of sweetness and the bond of innocence,
still believing that a God-gifted singer has only to
walk into the forum and open his lips for all men to
listen and applaud, or to shut their ears and curse ;
and ready, with the splendid enthusiasm of youth, to
accept either fate with becoming modesty and courage.
You know nothing of the social movements of the
hour, even less than nothing of the broad current of"
tendency on whose surface they are as straws showing:

DE PROFUNDIS. 233

the direction of the tide. For you, Letters is still the
noblest of crafts, the Pen, the sceptre of genius. It
would be easier for me to foster these illusions, or at
least to leave them unmolested. I shall get but little
thanks for turning my Diogenes' lantern upon them,
for showing as it is the wilderness of wilted petals and
withered stalks you have taken for a garden of Eden.
I shall get even less thanks, perhaps, for telling you
that martyrdom is as little to be feared as apotheosis
is to be hoped for.

Society has taken to reading. It has made Letters

fashionable. It has invented a literature for itself, and

fabricates its own writers by the score. It has invented

journalism, which feeds it with the tittle-tattle it loves ;

the modern drama and the modern novel, wherein it

sees, as in a beautifying mirror, its own follies

and stupidities and ignorances decked out in such

gewgaw graces of style as its present development of

taste enables it to relish. The vers de societe^ with

its opera- bouffe jingle and faded odour of hot-house

flowers, is its favoured substitute for the organ music

which filled the spacious times of great Elizabeth. In

a word, literature — imaginative literature — is dead in

England. All kinds of graveyard and charnel-house

counterfeits are dismally skipping and leering in its

likeness, but // — the Protean spirit of mirth and tears,

of pathos, fun, and tragedy — is as dead as Pharaoh.

Optimistic lovers of literature tell us it is but sleeping,

presently to rise gloriously renewed. 1 envy them so

happy a conviction, though how any thoughtful man

^34 DE PROFUNDI S.

can believe in that resurrection within the period of
our present civilisation is beyond my understanding.

A close inquiry into the ultimate causes of the decay
of literature would take us into deep water, and I
propose to touch only lightly on that portion of my
theme, which I would fain see exhaustively treated by
a writer possessed of the necessary knowledge. The
decline of religion, sapping the postulates upon which
imaginative literature is necessarily built, is an important
factor. The old beliefs which gave warmth and colour
to life are dispelled. Man is no longer the most en-
thralling of all problems, the most marvellous of all
spectacles, a living soul crossing the razor-bridge of
existence, with hell yawning beneath him and heaven
as his goal ; but a combination of salts and gases which
will sooner or later find their way back to the kindred
elements of which all nature is composed, held together
by a modicum of vital force, whose individuality will
be absorbed into the void of being at their dissolution.
We have grown commonplace to each other, and, as a
necessary consequence or corollary, to ourselves ; and
great imaginative literature is not written of or by
commonplace people. We have no longer the political
ideals of our ancestors to lend purpose to our efforts
and dignity to our lives. The liberties they fought
for, strove for through life and proclaimed in death, are
our unquestioned patrimony, and have grown common-
place, too. A less important factor, yet worthy of
mention, is the shrinkage of the globe caused by the
application of steam and electricity. The once illimit-

DE PROFUNDIS. 235

able earth has dwindled to the dimensions of an orange
slung in a network of rails and wires. We have shorn
man of eternity, and we are taking from him time and
space. The antres vast and deserts idle of old romance
have been crossed in an autumn trip by the shirt-fronted
and swallow-tailed gentleman who sits beside me at
dinner. He saw no anthropophagi, no men whose
heads do grow beneath their shoulders ; not even Chin-
gachgook or Uncas, only a few dirty and dispirited
savages in broken feathers and tattered blankets. Men
in tweeds and stove-pipe hats bargain for swine's flesh,
corn, and potatoes on the site of the City of Amaurote,
and two-cent steamers ply on the waters of Anyder.
You will not find Utopia or Brobdingnag on any chart,
and might as well look for a naiad in the pools of
Thessaly as for a fairy in the woods of Warwickshire.
God, the gods, the pixies, and the devil are gone, and a
man shall travel the wide world over and see nothing
better or worse than himself on this man-haunted
planet. And man, qua man, man ' simple of himself,'
is almost valueless as a subject for literature, as he is
beginning to find. Shorn of the adjuncts of the super-
natural ; seen simply as the foolish and cruel animal as
which history and observation reveal him ; ignorant even
of his own mechanism and of the laws which govern it ;
more darkly ignorant still of the vaster mysteries of
which he thinks himself the hub and centre ; he may
still make * copy ' for the cynic and the satirist — to the
poet he is hardly richer in suggestion than a kennel of
hounds, or the parrot-house at the Zoo.

236 DE PRO FUND IS.

We hear much nowadays of the prosperity of
literature. We who practise it are in the habit of
looking back with self-congratulatory scorn on those
times, not so far distant, when the rank and file of
the literary army were social pariahs; when even its
honoured veterans were held barely fit company for
merchants and professional men; and when it needed
the genius of Pope or the savage self-assertion of Swift
for a writer to be admitted on anything like equal
terms into the upper ranks of Society. We look back
with pity, a pity not untouched with scorn, on the
shadowy figure of Samuel Johnson, supperless and roof-
less in the midnight streets, on Goldsmith fuddling
himself in a Fleet Street tavern on a borrowed guinea,
and with contempt on the society which despised and
neglected them.

I don't say that either our pity or our contempt is
misplaced. Genius starving and in rags, genius drown-
ing its sordid troubles in eleemosynary drink, is a
pitiful spectacle, and contempt for the age which
despised it is a fitting sentiment. But I do say that we
might profitably look nearer home, at our own times,
and learn that, changed as is the condition of our
literary men, it is not in all respects — not even in the
most important — ^changed for the better. The old life
of hunger and hardship, rough and sordid as it was, had
its good sides. For one thing, it was so hard and
coarse, so ill -paid and generally contemned, that it
tempted nobody who did not believe himself to be a
genius to take it up. Of course, plenty of poor fellows

DE PROFUNDIS. 237

quite devoid of talent did take it up, but they thought
they had talent. And though, when failure had cured
them of their illusions, they sometimes came to have as
low an estimate of their craft as any society journalist
— they could scarcely have a lower than some who
thrive to-day — they started with a much higher ideal
than is common in these times. They proved that,
first, by joining so wretched and despised a profession
at all ; and, again, by their hearty and outspoken con-
tempt for the class of which we — their unworthy
successors — are content to be the very humble and
obedient servants — the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois^ of
course, scorned them, but his contempt, compared with
that of the artist for him, was as moonlight unto sun-
light, and as water unto wine. The middle-class
despised the literary man because they despised litera-
ture, and, despising it, they left it alone. They looked
after their ledgers and their day-books, their tallow,
and tea, and hides, and let the shabby poor devil of an
author go his way, and scribble his nonsense for those
who cared to read it ; which was precisely the best thing
they could have done, and what I wish to heaven they
could be persuaded to do again.

Everybody knows those pathetic lines in * The
Vanity of Human Wishes ' which their author, grand
old Samuel Johnson, could never repeat without a
tremor in his voice — lines in which he bids the young
aspirant to literature to ' mark what ills the scholar's
life assail ; Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol.'
Of all these ills we have taught ourselves to think the

238 DE PROFUNDIS.

patron the worst. We don't mind toil, since it is
the universal lot, and by it we may escape from
want ; envy, though it will intrude itself into all but
the noblest heart, rarely hurts any one but him who
harbours it ; the gaol is no longer an inevitable incident
in the scholar's career, and of that other bugbear, the
patron, we are gloriously free. When Mr. Jones writes
a poem, or Mr. Brown writes a novel, he does not look
through the peerage for the name and titles of some
noble friend of letters who will give him ten pounds
for a fulsome dedication. His patron is the public,
which, if it likes the book, will give its author a
good deal more than ten pounds, will admit him to
the society of its wives and daughters, and even
let him marry one of the latter, if he will. The
advantages of the new system over the old are
obvious. The disadvantages are less obvious, but
they exist, for all that.

In plain English, all this talk about the widespread
love of literature which distinguishes this age from all
preceding epochs, is the veriest and saddest bunkum
ever talked. The mob — by which I mean the in-
tellectual hoi polloi^ without distinction of social classes,
including 97 or so per cent, of English men and women
— has no conception of what literature is, and,
consequently, no love of it. The public likes books,
which is quite another thing. The books it prefers,
like most other things that find favour in its eyes, are
generally idle, silly, and useless. The sale of a book of
imaginative literature is almost always in exact ratio

DE PROFUNDI S. 239

with its worthlessness to the heart and brain of any-
living creature. Literature is undergoing that process
of vulgarisation which is the inevitable fate of all great
things unfortunate enough to attract the attention of
the crowd — see the history of Christianity passim.
While that religion was the faith only of a few scattered
handfuls of enthusiasts, it retained something of the
divine spirit of its founder. It became the shibboleth
of Europe, and its degradation advanced pari passu
with its popularity, till to-day, were it not for an
occasional phenomenon like Father Damien, the very
meaning of the word would be forgotten. The mass of
its professors are as stupid and as cruel as their pagan
ancestors who crucified the Man we mock by calling
' Master,' never open the Book which contains His
laws, and spend their lives in breaking them. And, as
a consequence — for in the pasture of humanity it is the
sheep who give the law to the shepherd — its so-called
teachers are devoid of every characteristic of Christianity.
Its accredited representatives are gentlemanly and
cultured agnostics, wise in the learning of the
Egyptians, and using the political power Christ speci-
fically forbade them to accept to veto every proposed
law illuminated by a spark of His spirit. Its un-
accredited teachers are noisy vulgarians, of whom
' General ' Booth is the type in excelsis. I am speaking
roughly and broadly, of course. I don't say there are
no Christians in the world. I have met one or two,
and there are no doubt many more, priests and laymen
of all sorts of Churches. But they are a scattered

240 DE PRO FUND IS.

remnant ; the very smallest of drops in the very
biggest of buckets.

A strikingly similar effect has been produced upon
literature by the spread of Uninstruction, facetiously
known to its propagators and recipients as the March
of Education. What I am here saying will, I know,
disgust you profoundly. I wouldn't give a button for
you if I thought it would not, because it is of the very
essence of what is justly called pessimism, and a
pessimist of your years is as sad a spectacle as it has
been given to my eyes to see. Most people believe in
the capacity of the average man to receive and assimilate
elevated ideas ; to become not merely ' educated,' but
in the best sense of the word, 'instructed' ; to select for
the building of his mental tissue and fibre the best
materials and reject the poorest ; just as, if he had
the choice, he would learn to prefer good beef and
honest beer to the offal and swipes on which he is too
often condemned to batten. As a matter of fact, the
exact opposite is the case. It is not that the average
reader is incapable of differentiating between good books
and bad. He differentiates with unfailing accuracy,
and always chooses the bad. He does more, he creates
bad literature. In his own image creates he it. Bad
literature only exists where, and in proportion as, the
mass of the population is ' educated.' As readers are
few, books are few and good. As readers grow
numerous books increase in number and decline in
excellence. To popularise literature is inevitably to
kill it.

DE PROFUNDI S. 241

What may be thought by many a very ready and
complete answer may be offered here. I think I hear
it asked, ' Are not Dickens, Scott, and Thackeray
read by everybody, and are not their writings great
literature ? ' Yes, but they are popular, not because of,
but in spite of, the qualities which make them valuable
to the cultured minority. They are read because they
make their reader laugh, or cry, or shudder, because
they distract his mind from its everyday occupations by
thrilling stories of adventure, or please him by repro-
ducing familiar scenes in an atmosphere of romance or
caricature. Ask the average reader which he prefers,
the rollicking farce of ' Pickwick ' or the social science
and satire of ' Hard Times ' ; which interests him most,
that sickly and impossible little Nell, or the deeply and
calmly passionate Lizzie Hexam ? Contrast that
insufferable bit of maudlin sentimentality, the death of
Paul Dombey, with Paul's talk with the clockmaker,
or with the vision of Sidney Carton on the platform of
the guillotine, or with the sentencing of Abel Magwitch.
I have heard the first lauded to the skies a thousand
times ; I have hardly ever heard the others even
mentioned, I insist specially on Dickens for several
reasons. He is indubitably the most popular of all
great English writers, and, to my thinking at least, as
indubitably the most inartistic and imperfect of them
all. And it is always his trickiest and least worthy
work which is most admired.

We see this utter lack of artistic comprehension in
the fashion in which the public rushes from the altars of

R

242 DE PRO FUND IS.

the very few really great men it cares to worship to
that of any bedizened fetish which takes its silly fancy.
To tell me that the public which adores Miss Marie
Corelli, and buys a hundred thousand copies of ' Three
Men in a Boat ' has any comprehension of literature as
literature is to insult my common-sense. It likes Miss
Corelli and Walter Scott, Dickens and Mr. Jerome, for
the same reasons. Scott and Miss Corelli both tell
stories. The one tells them like a great artist, the other
does not, Dickens and Mr. Jerome both aim at
inspiring laughter. That they succeed equally is as
good a commentary on the common intelligence as to
take alternate swigs of comet hock and unsweetened
gin would be upon the physical palate of an individual.
True, Scott and Dickens will remain, while our
latter-day idols will sooner or later slip back into their
native obscurity. The majority would let them and
their bungling imitators slide together, and would regret
one set of writers as little as the other.

And, as time goes on, the intelligent minority is
becoming more and more limited to that one task of
preserving the valuable portions of the literature of
past times, and less and less operative as an inducement
to the creation of new work of value. It is not that
that minority is decreasing in numbers. There are at
least as many men and women of fine taste and just
judgment to-day in ratio with the population as there
have ever been, but beside the vast mass of the
ignorant and vulgar they are hardly worth while cater-
ing for. Literature is a trade like another ; and even

DE PRO FUND IS. 243

men of high power, who begin the literary life with
high ideals, grow weary of ' sitting empty stomach'd
on Parnassus,' and descend into the dirty arena to
contest with the crowd of sublimated penny-a-liners
who provide our current fiction. Read the next half-
dozen novels published by the best among them, and
see what sediment of idea or emotion they leave in
your mind. Their authors are men of real talent,
capable of producing matter of solid worth, but seduced
from allegiance to their genius and their higher instincts
by the facility with which they can make large sums
of money by catering for the stupidity they despise.
They can manufacture a mediocre novel with one third
the time and trouble it would take to write a good
one, and they can get six times as much for it. One
of the most popular and able of the crowd told me
the other day that he had contracted to deliver nine
average-sized volumes of fiction in the next three
years, or three novels of the ordinary circulating library
length per annum. And this, in addition to fugitive
journalistic and critical work; so that for eight or ten
hours a day the pen would not leave his fingers, and
an hour after venting finis to one story he must take it
up again to write ' Chapter I.' of the next. What is
likely to be, what can be, the value of work so done.''
As Carlyle asked Lytton, who was boasting the regu-
larity with which every hour of his working day was
filled by its especial task — ' And when d'ye thinky
man?' Nor is this case at all exceptional. I could
name half a dozen others who produce at approximate

244 DE PROFUNDIS.

rates, and there are literally scores who write their two
and three novels a year. There are, of course, thank

God — one hopes there will always continue to be

one or two loftier souls who scorn

To take a part
At the Belshazzar's feast of Art,

and, contemptuous of the servile crowd who sell their
manhood and blaspheme their genius in the literary
brothel, walk proudly aloof, speaking their word of
honest counsel to the few who care to listen. As the
else obsolete spirit of Christianity finds splendid, if
fitful, recrudescence in the lives of Robert Owens and
Father Damiens, and of others not less honourable of
whom the world never hears ; so even this century of
intellectual prostitution is sweetened by such men as
Browning and Meredith in literature, Wagner and
Liszt in music, G. F. Watts in painting, Ruskin and
Spencer in criticism and philosophy. That such men
are few is not the fault of the age. They were never
common in any age. But in former times their voices
would at least have been audible, not quenched by the
roar of the catchpenny quacks and ignorant dunces
who now monopolise the public ear. Fame came to
Meredith, and Liszt, and Wagner to find them old,
and to Berlioz to find him dead. Ruskin, who
preached the purest of gospels with unequalled
eloquence for more than half a century, was voted
' mad ' by the generation he pitied and reproved.
Spencer's ' Data of Ethics ' has been before the world

DE PROFUNDIS. 245

for twenty years, and has sold to the extent of five
thousand copies. Watts, not long ago, offered to
paint the walls of a public building gratis, and (shade
of Raffaelle ! ) to find his own colours ! The offer
was refused ! Meanwhile, the ' Master - Christian '
makes a literary reputation, ' go-as-you-please ' shows
cover their three hundred nights apiece, and the
prurient claptrap phantasies by which M. Jan Van
Beers disgraces his genius set agog the capitals of
Europe.

That bastard sister of Literature known as Jour-
nalism was doomed from the hour of her birth to a
more rapid, though scarcely deeper, degradation than
that to which Letters has fallen. The direct servant of
the great mass, and appealing to the average mind, it
started of necessity on a low intellectual plane. Many
of its disabilities are inherent in its very nature, others
as grave are the inevitable results of the pitiably low
ideals of the men who direct and cater for it. Of the
first class, the ad captandum judgments pronounced
from day to day — indeed, from hour to hour — on
matters of the most vital importance in every con-
ceivable direction, are the worst features of journalism.
A trenchant style, a happy gravity of audacity in
dealing with any subject entrusted to his pen, and a
practised rapidity of composition, are gifts far more
valued in the leader writer of a daily paper than the
most exhaustive scholarship or the most truly philo-
sophic habit of thought. The most solid and brilliant
talents are useless to the journalist unless combined

246 DE PRO FUND IS.

with that ' intellectual levity ' which Matthew Arnold
justly declared to be the curse of modern intellectual
life. He has only his hour and a half wherein to
manufacture his ' column and a turn,' whether his
theme be a measure aifecting imperial destinies or a
forecast of the events of the racing season. Questions,
to which Mr. Lecky or Mr. Frederic Harrison would
give hours or days of anxious thought and carefiil
research under the best possible conditions for quiet
reflection, are settled by him in the gas-heated and
tumultuous atmosphere of a printing office at the
rate of twelve hundred words an hour. Remember
also that every journal now running is the organ
of a political clique, a trading corporation, or an
individual faddist ; and ask yourself what is likely
to be the value of its views on nine-tenths of the
matters treated in its columns, and what chance of
expressing his own convictions — always supposing
him to possess any — a retained and salaried scribe
can hope for.

So much — for the moment — for the literary aspect
of the journalistic craft, to which I shall have presently
to revert. Its principal functions are, of course, the
securing and publication of news. This task it
discharges with an efficiency beyond praise. There
are episodes in the history of journalism of difficulties
vanquished, dangers confronted, and pain, discomfort,
and even death tranquilly borne by pressmen in the
search for ' copy ' which rank beside the most famous
military heroisms. But such feats find their set-off in

DE PROFUNDIS. 247

others in which heroism, not to speak of common
honesty, is sadly to seek. More than once in my
experience, leading metropolitan journals have stooped
to actions only to be described as base. By what
other epithet can be classed the purchase, from a
thievish Government clerk, of the draft of a Treaty
which not merely the Government of the day, but
the whole country, was interested in keeping a pro-
found secret } More than one such case has occurred
of recent years.

Indeed, in the last generation the whole tone of
the Press has been appreciably lowered. Formerly
there seemed to exist among the editors of the leading
London papers a sort of tacit bargain not to outbid
each other in popular favour by the publication of too
questionable matter. The loathsome cause celehre still
remembered in legal circles as the Bolton and Parke
trial was a case in point. Only one journal, and that
a weekly of low order, published the evidence in full,
and there was a noticeable and praiseworthy reticence
in the journalistic comments it evoked. After the
equally disgusting Cleveland Street affair the very
atmosphere of journalism was foul as with the
noisome effluvium of an open sewer. When the
Criminal and Divorce Courts are sitting, barely a
week passes in which humanity and decency are
not outraged by stories of murder and eroticism,
dragged out by counsel, witnesses, special reporters,
and leader writers to a hideous tenuity of sickening
detail. There would seem to be no length to which

248 DE PROFUNDIS.

editors do not think themselves justified in going,
no degradation of their craft for which they do not
hold themselves excused, by the increase in their
circulation of a few thousand copies, and the con-
sequent flow of advertisements to their columns.
When neither war, adultery, murder, nor less men-
tionable matter is at hand, the ingenuity of the
newspaper staffs is devoted to the manufacture of
some catchpenny horror which may, as nearly as
possible, rival their attractions. A dozen cases of
cholera or typhoid are magnified into the proportions
of historic epidemics — more ink has been shed over
the influenza than in centuries had been spent in
chronicling the Plague of London.

In the lowest of its most recent manifestations,
journalism takes us too far from literature for me to
follow it. The cackle of ' society ' small talk was
bad enough, but at least, while listening to it, we
were in the company of well-bred if rather brainless
people. It was occasionally amusing, sometimes even
instructive, though it could have been the exclusive
mental food only of a lower class of intelligence than is
conceivable, short of microcephalic idiocy. Its success
has prompted the journalistic pioneer to seek an even
lower depth, and we have more than one journal
which spices the failing attractions of ' my lady's
tattle, filtered through her maid,' with the dirty
gossip of the West End night houses, and devotes
equal space to Belgravia and Pimlico.

So far from having been of any service to literature,

DE PROFUNDIS. 249

journalism has been by far its most potent enemy.
Its influence on Letters is baleful at every point at
which they touch. Its hasty and uninstructed judg-
ments on vitally important matters, the vade-mecum-
cum-British-Museum-reading-room veneer of learning
it parades ; the cheaply gaudy style of its corre-
spondence ; the flat cockneyism of its police and
general reports, are all influences inimical to litera-
ture. It lives by, and fosters, all the least worthy
impulses of the public mind ; and when it is not
tragically shallow in dealing with great questions,
it is trivially prolix on unimportant ones. It gives
importance to all matters in pretty nearly inverse
ratio to their real gravity — a hundred columns to
a petty social earthquake like the Baccarat Scandal,
and a shamefaced paragraph to a great artistic
achievement. To these vices, inherent, as I have
said, in its very being — since it lives by popular
favour — it has of late times added another. It has
arrogated to itself the flinction of literary criti-
cism. What would be the worth of that criticism,
were it performed with all possible honesty and all
possible desire to forward the interests of literature,
is easily ascertainable. Criticism is ungrateful work,
and very poorly paid, consequently no man of any real
faculty ever willingly stays in it. It may sometimes be
the cradle of the literary infant Achilles, it is often the
asylum of the broken Belisarius, but it can boast few
effective and able-bodied members of the literary army.
* Critic ' must always remain what it has always been,

250 DE PROFUNDIS.

the polite English equivalent for a man of unproved or
abortive talent. And criticism is very rarely done
with any honesty, or with any desire to forward the
interests of literature. On the majority of journals it
is scamped as lightly and as easily as possible ; on the
big dailies and the professedly literary organs it is
performed with open and cynical dishonesty.

Balzac, who hated, as much as he was hated by,
the Parisian Press, imagined a condition of affairs
which, whether or not yet established in France, is
flourishing in rank luxuriance on our own shores. He
indicated how a clique of journalists, who, like that
other fraternity, his immortal ' Treize,' should devote
their lives to the furtherance of their common interests,
could, for a time at least, impose upon the public
themselves and their friends as the leaders of literature.
The seed seemed to have fallen on stony ground, for
nearly fifty years passed before the crop reared its head
above the soil. It is ripe now, and ready for the
sickle, which has already been laid to its root by
more than one honest hand. The clique of scribbling
condottieri who levy blackmail on the public admiration,
decrying or ignoring all who will not help roll their
literary and artistic logs, have seen their most
prosperous days. The trick was too thin, so very
thin that it is a wonder it should have served so long.
Mr. Jones, after his year or two of patient log-rolling,
publishes his feeble little volume of verse or fiction;
and the clique he has served, after hailing in the
sonorous cant of criticism a new light in the literary

DE PRO FUND IS. 251

heaven, feeds his flickering flame with paragraphic
fuel, and goes on to tell the world that Mr. Jones's
favourite breakfast dish is eggs and bacon, or that
Mr. Jones prefers a clay pipe to a cigar, and adduces
similar facts regarding their protege, until people grow
to think that Mr. Jones must be somebody very
important indeed so to pervade journalistic space.
A dozen such bogus deities could be counted, with
whose praises men's ears have rung during the last
year or two. The players in this merry little round
game do not in the least mind writing themselves
down asses in the eyes of all intelligent men, so long
as the public reads and believes. Mr, Andrew Lang
declared that no man of the last six hundred years
but Mr. Haggard could have written ' Eric Brighteyes,'
a statement I do most potently believe, though,
perhaps, not quite as Mr. Lang would have me. These
gentry are never at a loss for a fetish to dance round.
King Log succeeds King Stork, and the incense pot
goes on stinking before the throne. Indeed, there are
half a dozen thrones, and half a dozen King Logs and
King Storks sitting thereon, and every journalistic rag
has its private deity.

' Granted all this,' I think I hear you ask, ' is it
not possible for a man at once honest and able to make
a living in the literary circles of London ? ' Candidly,
I doubt if it is. There is honesty and honesty. The
word has many meanings, or rather, shades of meaning,
I am myself indifl^erent honest, though I should be
sorry not to have honester acquaintances. A man

252 DE PRO FUND IS.

engaged in literary work in London can be negatively
honest at the price of more or less discomfort. He
can hold aloof from the men with whom he is forced
by the exigencies of his work to mix, and so avoid
belonging to a literary clique and shun temptations
to critical dishonesty. If he makes friends among the
literary class he can only hope to keep them by puffing
their work through thick and thin, for to speak or
write unfavourably of it is to be denounced and
shunned as a traitor. * Claw me and I'll claw thee,'
is the universal rule, and literary men are so dishonest
in the matter of criticism as to be incapable of com-
prehending honesty. And honest in the truest and
highest sense, honest to his own convictions, to his
public duty, no man who writes for his livelihood can
possibly be at any less cost than starvation. He must
accept the degraded ideas of literature now in vogue.
He must speak no truth, however vital and necessary,
which can offend the prurient squeamishness of the
reading public ; denounce no falsehood, however pusil-
lanimous or deadly, dear to their stupidity.

Candidly, then, I will have no hand in bringing you
to London, and will do nothing to help you if you
come. If you had less talent than I beheve you to
possess, my answer might be different. To swell by
one the number of unideaed scribblers who are
scrambling for ha'pence in the literary gutter would
not greatly matter. Imaginative literature is dead and
buried, and any number of ghosts may skip upon its
grave to the strains of Mr. Redford and Mr. William

DE PROFUNDI S. 253

Alexander Coote for all I care. But I will not, if I
can help it, see such a life as yours might be squandered
in that sordid Dance of Death. I cry unto you, de
profundis^ as to one entering the jaws of Hell, ' Go
back ! Stay in the sunshine. Descend not to these
noisome shades.' To me, sick now so long of all the
petty jars and miserable spites of this dirty ' literary
life,' it seems incredible that any erect and featherless
biped with a soul inside him should want to join it.
Ignorance only could beget the desire. Take the
word of one who knows, and who has bought his
knowledge dearly and bitterly, only saving some
paltry fragments of the soul he started with at the
cost of most that makes life endurable, and stay where
you are.

You have an honourable and usefiil career before
you in the profession your father wishes you to follow,
and one good doctor is worth a planetful of gentlemen
of the Press. I am not counselling you to give up
literature. Practise it where you are, for which your
life will give you ample leisure, and far better oppor-
tunities of practising it to worthy effect than you could
find in London. The only way to retain the freshness
of heart and loyalty of purpose which make a poet is
to keep out of this Pandemonium. You will find the
best substitutes for the inspirations the world has lost
in field and forest, not amid bricks and mortar ; in the
pages of the poets, not in the cluck and gabble of the
Press. You will hear a truer gospel from the lips of
the humblest peasant than in the chatter of the

254 DE PROFUNDIS.

scribbling Sadducees of literary society. You know
Blake's lines : —

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy ;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies.
Lives in eternity's sunrise.

When you have penetrated the spirit of that verse you
will have no flirther desire to change the life of
tranquil thought and healthy action among the
woods of Beechcroft: for the heart-and-brain-sickening
existence of a literary drudge.

I am,

Your affectionate uncle,

Henry

PRINTED BY STRANGEWAYS ©" SONS,
TOWER STREET, CAMBRIDGE CIRCUS, LONDON, W.C.

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